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The Typographic Imaginary in
Early Modern English Literature

The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature contributes

to the understanding of how printing changed early modern English literary
culture. Rachel Stenner discusses printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s
paratexts; Robert Copland’s dialogues; the prose fictions of William
Baldwin, George Gascoigne and Thomas Nashe; and the courtly poetry of
Edmund Spenser. This study argues that early modern English literature
engages imaginatively with printing and generates a particular aesthetic: the
typographic imaginary.

Rachel Stenner lectures in Renaissance Literature at the University of

Sheffield, UK.
Material Readings in Early Modern Culture
Series editor: James Daybell
Plymouth University, UK
Adam Smyth
Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK

The series provides a forum for studies that consider the material forms of texts as
part of an investigation into the culture of early modern England. The editors invite
proposals of a multi- or interdisciplinary nature, and particularly welcome proposals
that combine archival research with an attention to theoretical models that might
illuminate the reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take
innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms of the kinds of
primary materials under investigation, and in terms of methodologies. What are the
questions that have yet to be asked about writing in its various possible embodied
forms? Are there varieties of materiality that are critically neglected? How does form
mediate and negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts inform
how they are read, interpreted and situated?

Recent in this series:

The Elizabethan Top Ten

Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England
Edited by Andy Kesson and Emma Smith

Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England

Politics, Religion, and News Culture
By Gary Schneider

Singing the News

Ballads in Mid-Tudor England
By Jenni Hyde

Text, Food And The Early Modern Reader

Eating Words
By Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher

Reading Drama in Tudor England

By Tamara Atkin
The Typographic Imaginary
in Early Modern English
Literature

Rachel Stenner
First published 2019
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Rachel Stenner to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-4724-8042-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-55185-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is dedicated to Indiana, Joseph, and Jane.
Contents

List of figuresix
Acknowledgementsx
Note on quotationxi
Abbreviationsxii
Introduction: print and the difference it makes 1
Implications 5
Critical mapping 11
Cases 17

1 Instructional texts and print symbolism: Christopher

Plantin, Hieronymus Hornschuch, and Joseph Moxon 32
Processes 35
People 46
Conclusion 51

2 An emergent typographic imaginary in William

Caxton’s paratexts 56
Life in literature, diplomacy, and commerce 59
The benefits of printing in Recuyell of the
Historyes of Troye 60
Imagined typographic space 64
Reorganising continuity: Mirrour of the World 71
Conclusion 76

3 Robert Copland, Thomas Blague, and the

printer–author dialogue 83
Printer–author dialogue and its mutations 84
Characterising the printer: gatekeepers of the press 89
Print and metacommunication: uses of the
dialogue form 98
Conclusion 104
viii Contents
4 Protestant printing and humanism in Beware the Cat:
undoing printing 110
Protestant printer and humanist scholar 112
Dead bodies and printer’s devils 116
Printing and penning 120
Conclusion 122

5 George Gascoigne and Richard Tottel: negotiating

manuscript and print in the poetic miscellany 128
Typographic value in the prefatory poses of A Hundreth
Sundrie Flowres 132
The benefits of printing in The Posies of George Gascoigne
Esquire 139
Conclusion 142

6 Edmund Spenser’s early and mid-career: public image and

machine horror 147
Early career self-presentation: The Shepheardes Calender
and Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters 148
Monstrous typographic fertility in The Faerie Queene 153
Resonant Errour in ‘The Teares of the Muses’ 161
Conclusion 163

7 St Paul’s Churchyard and the meanings of print: Pierce

Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell 169
Nashe’s mosaic of the print trade 173
Waste and matter 179
The figurative authority of print 183
Conclusion 184

Conclusion: love and loathing in Grub Street 188

Index197
Figures

1.1 ‘Typographus’ woodcut by Joost Amman from The Book

of Trades (1568). © Trustees of the British Museum (1904,
0206.103.20)40
1.2 Woodcut from La Grante Danse Macabre des Hommes
et des Femmes (The great dance of death), printed by
Matthias Hus in Lyons, 1499. © The British Library Board
(I.B.41735, G.1) 45
2.1 William Caxton’s Advertisement (1477). © The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California (Z232.C38, A3) 57
2.2 Engraving from Elizabeth Woodville’s copy of William
Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1473). © The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California (62222) 67
3.1 Detail of a page from Everyman, printed by John Skot
in 1528. © The Huntington Library, San Marino,
California (14195) 86
3.2 Detail of the first page of Robert Copland’s dialogue in
William Neville’s The Castell of Pleasure (1530). © The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California (49038) 87
Acknowledgements

The mentors, friends, and loved ones who have helped me write this book
are many. It started as my doctoral research, completed at the University
of Bristol and funded by a University Postgraduate Research Scholarship.
I am lucky to have been mentored by four superb scholars at Bristol: Tam-
sin Badcoe, Lesel Dawson, Jane Griffiths, and John Lee. My examiners,
Kate McLune and Jason Scott-Warren, gave me invaluable early pointers on
revising the text. At the University of Sheffield the input of Cathy Shrank
helped me with some of my knottiest problems whilst my wonderful early
modern colleagues helped me laugh at some of the trickiest times: Marcus
Nevitt, Emma Rhatigan, Tom Rutter, and Charlotte Steenbrugge. At both
Bristol and Sheffield, over several years, Mike Malay provided moral sup-
port. I would like to thank the audiences and readers who have received
this research and responded in ways that have helped me to make it better,
particularly Anne Coldiron, Jennifer Richards, and Adam Smyth. Parts of
Chapter 4 are reproduced with permission from John Wiley and Sons; the
chapter draws on my 2016 article, ‘The Act of Penning in William Baldwin’s
Beware the Cat’ in Renaissance Studies (30.3, 1–16). My most heartfelt
thanks go to three much-beloved family members. My mother’s wise words
and capacity for generosity continue to inspire me to be a better parent and
a better daughter. My own daughter’s conversations and questions about
the stories we tell are my most thought-provoking daily exchanges; she has
helped me keep my feet on the ground when I needed it most. The person
who continues to make it all possible is Joseph, without whose unfailing
belief and unending patience I could not do what I do.
Note on Quotation

In quotation I have corrected obvious misprints only when these impinge on

the sense. I have not added missing letters, nor have I regularised spelling.
I make no attempt to replicate the typography of texts that I quote; where
sight of the typography is necessary to my argument I have instead supplied
images.
Abbreviations

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. Oxford:

ODNB 
Oxford University Press. 2004.
OED Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press. 2017.
PBSA 
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America.
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900.
Introduction
Print and the difference it makes

The central claim of this book is that writers in the late medieval and
early modern periods created imaginative depictions of the print trade as a
means of analysing their evolving media ecology and understanding their
place within it. To a highly self-conscious book culture, authors from Wil-
liam Caxton onwards add a typographic focus that assesses the significance
of the printed book as a material object, and the specific processes that
create it. This concern extends to at least the eighteenth century and regis-
ters in the writings of, amongst others, Robert Copland, William Baldwin,
George Gascoigne, Thomas Nashe, Edmund Spenser, John Taylor, Edward
Ward, and Alexander Pope. Many of these writers either worked within
or were closely connected to the print trade: Caxton and Copland were
both printers; Baldwin and Nashe worked for the London printers Edward
Whitchurch and John Danter, respectively; Spenser and Pope are poets who
liaised closely with their publishers and printers. These figures had more
than a passing acquaintance with the places, people, and material culture
of printing. The labour of words being constructed out of pieces of type
and the mechanics of production were things that they either participated
in or had the opportunity to witness. It is therefore not surprising that they
reproduce that milieu figuratively within their works. This is not all that
they have in common. When these writers imagine the world of print they
employ a particular assortment of techniques: the typographic imaginary.
This book proposes the typographic imaginary as both an authorial strat-
egy and a critical tool. It can help us to recognise the fact that early modern
culture generated a significant number of imaginative responses to printing
and help us to better understand what those responses reveal about the cul-
ture’s perception of its media. Three premises are fundamental to my argu-
ment. First, representations of the print trade are a discernible presence
in late medieval and early modern literature. Second, when writers make
these representations they use the shared techniques of the typographic
imaginary. Third, over the course of the sixteenth century the techniques
of the typographic imaginary become increasingly adopted by authors as
an established way of talking about printing. By better appreciating the
concerns that authors express when they depict the world of print we gain
2 Introduction
a clearer understanding of their navigation of a media landscape that was
being changed by a new technology.
As an authorial strategy, the typographic imaginary operates within nar-
rative, symbolism, form, particular tropes, intertext, and a set of shared
debates. Texts that engage it do several overlapping things. They fore-
ground the activities, agents, and trade of printing, and directly depict
printed matter. At its most narrative level, the typographic imaginary
describes a conglomeration that Alexandra Halasz terms the ‘marketplace
of print’, referring precisely to ‘the practices involved in the making of
books – writing and printing, and the processes involved in producing and
circulating books – the capitalization of the book trade and its distribution
procedures’ (2006, p. 3). Her definition is helpful for discussing trade in
particular, but it does not specifically include the human figures who are
key to book production practices. The personnel of the trade feature par-
ticularly noticeably in the typographic imaginary, especially the printer or
stationer. In this respect, the concept builds on D. F. McKenzie’s influential
model of the sociology of texts, which emphasises ‘the human motives and
interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmis-
sion, and consumption’ (1999, p. 15). In the texts that I study here, print
trade personnel may appear staffing a bookstall, in spaces that are either
abstract or named. They also appear inside the architectural space of the
printing house itself. One particularly prominent site is the urban book zone
of St Paul’s Churchyard in London, which was booming in the sixteenth
century (Mentz 2006, p. 186).1 Texts engaging the typographic imaginary
describe the detailed technical processes, such as the setting of type or the
binding of a printed book, that occur within or around these places. They
speak directly about the stages of, and elements in, the book’s production.
These texts consequently often contain narratives of their own creation and
dwell on the distribution of literary authority. This topic proves to be one
of the typographic imaginary’s central concerns and its texts return to it
time and again. Related to its interest in process, the typographic imaginary
also pays particular attention to the relationships between different types of
textualities. This is a crucial point. Writings animated by the typographic
imaginary are keenly interested in how different kinds of text relate to each
other. They position themselves as part of a wider culture of the book that
includes (for example) orality, texts that circulate publicly in manuscript,
visual representation, and handwritten material on the point of being
transformed into print but not yet widely dispersed. These writings show a
marked self-consciousness, however, about moving between media – most
particularly, into print – and the sometimes troubling transformations that
texts undergo during that process.2
Several of these features are legible in ‘Errata, or Faults to the Reader’, a
poem written by John Taylor (the self-styled ‘Water Poet’) which prefaces
his collected works of 1630.3 This poem is part of the genre of errata poems
and it opens with a complaint about the errors that have crept into the
 Introduction 3
text during printing: ‘Faults, but not faults escap’d, I would they were, / If
they were faults escap’d, they were not here’ (1630, sig.Bv). Taylor refers
to the table of ‘faults escaped’, sometimes also called the ‘Errata list’, that
appears at the back of many printed books. Here printers would list the
mistakes that had escaped correction and remained to be found, and dealt
with, by the reader in the book. Taylor’s poem is governed throughout by
the overarching conceit of the errata list representing his personal failings
as well as printerly error. He expands his opening pun on ‘escap’d’ to state
that if the faults truly had escaped then they would not remain ‘in many a
page and line’ (1630, sig.Bv). He creates his entire poem around the reader’s
familiarity with and understanding of conventions of the printed book. In
so doing he also depicts the book itself. His poem mentions several stages in
the production process: the writing of his ‘occasions’, the collective printing
effort of the ‘foure Printers’ who produced the book, and the correction of
the proofs, here, he claims, poorly conducted ‘Since the Correcters let’ the
errors ‘passe the Presse’ (1630, sig.Bv). When he states ‘Men may perceiue
the Printers faults, or mine’ (1630, sig.Bv), Taylor blames himself and the
printer, indicating that the responsibility for the book is shared between at
least two agents. Despite this shared labour, Taylor asserts his possessive
authority over the text. One of the ways that he does this is to present the
errors as indications of his moral failings. Conceptualising the printed text
as a jail, he states, ‘my faults are heere in prison fast’ (1630, sig.Bv). The
mistakes are locked onto the page, and they represent his crimes, rather than
anyone else’s, now implicitly receiving due punishment by exposure to public
viewing. He later compares the errors to ‘spots of sinne’ that take ‘the fairest
features for their Inne’, going on to remark that ‘Below the Moone no full
perfection is, / And alwaies some of vs are all amisse’ (1630, sig.Bv). Printerly
mistakes soil the fair text and Taylor makes them analogous to the sin and
corruption that afflict ‘some of vs’. He likens sinful humans to marred texts,
which also works back against the printing process to indicate the inevita-
bility of it going ‘amisse’. His imagery of moral and material fault activates
the symbolic potential of the printing process. This is a further important
technique in the typographic imaginary. Texts derive from the processes of
book creation a vocabulary that deploys technical terms and techniques
symbolically. Typographic symbolism is sometimes employed playfully or
through puns, but it can also refer to less ludic scenarios informed by moral-
ity, sexuality, monstrosity, violence, and mortality.
Related to its symbolism, the typographic imaginary shows tropes about
printed book production in formation. Sometimes these tropes significantly
differ from what we know of contemporary practice. Early modern books
are certainly bedevilled by bad printing, but it is also true that not all of
them are. The inveterately sloppy printer that Taylor portrays in 1630 is
by then a stock figure of typographic rhetoric. Jane Griffiths notes a simi-
lar phenomenon when she comments on the myth of print fixity. This idea
developed because ‘despite numerous continuities between manuscript and
4 Introduction
print production, and despite the fact that print demonstrably did not, in
any actual, physical sense, “fix” a text’ claims about ‘its stability nonethe-
less became something of a trope in the prefaces of early printed texts, as
printers sought to advertise their editorial role’ (2015, p. 14). Griffiths is
pointing out that printers’ prefaces developed a rhetoric around print fixity
which became a culturally current idea and remained until quite recently
an accepted belief about print culture. There are other tropes about which
readers have been more suspicious, the editorial fiction for instance. In the
chapters that follow I spend time in the entertaining company of those
shady, clever, bookish figures who claim to have prepared for print some
of the landmark texts of the early modern period: Baldwin’s G.B., Gas-
coigne’s G.T., and Spenser’s E.K. Fictional editors of printed books claim
to have readied someone else’s work for the press but (in the three cases
that I discuss) are, in fact, created as fundamental figurative components
of that work. They are imaginary characters who function as a trope for
printed book production. Moreover, at a time when the terminology for the
activities of editorial agents had not fully coalesced, editorial fictions show
authors representing, analysing, and moulding the cultural prestige of edito-
rial activity.4
Through these characters we gain access to a final technique of the typo-
graphic imaginary, intertextual allusion to printed formal models. Occa-
sionally the rhetoric of a text functions by overt or covert reference to the
typographic strategies of a particular forerunner. As I argue in the chap-
ters that follow, this can exceed incidental discursive similarity and become
explicit. We see, for example, Gascoigne in 1573 aligning himself with the
strategies of the 1557 text usually known as Tottel’s Miscellany, Songes
and Sonnettes, Written by the Right Honorable Lorde Henry Howard Late
Earle of Surrey, and Other. The Miscellany itself picks up on intuitions dem-
onstrated in Caxton’s writings from the 1470s. As it evolves from the late
fifteenth century through the sixteenth century and beyond, the typographic
imaginary generates increasing authority; this is evident when authors inter-
textually invoke previous iterations of its strategies.
The typographic imaginary is an assortment of techniques that authors
use in varying arrangements within the parameters of their own concerns.
It describes the shared language and semiotics that printing offered them.
They use that language to analyse the forms that print enabled them to cre-
ate and to address concerns about media change with its attendant cultural
and social consequences. Writers adopt the techniques of the typographic
imaginary because it provides them, as makers of imaginary worlds, tools
for reflecting on the potential of print, be that potential celebratory or haz-
ardous. These tools also help authors assess the value of printed texts and
their own position in an economy in which any person with money in their
pocket can purchase their books – or choose to pass them by. With these
tools, authors weigh up their relationships with their co-producers and their
relationships to established systems of literary production. They legitimate
 Introduction 5
their strategies by using the techniques that other authors use and thereby
participate in a shared literary discourse. Occasionally they point out that
they are doing this by alluding to those other creative agents. We should,
however, be wary of the risk that any critical categorisation of an earlier
period imposes upon that period connections that are shaped by the critic’s
own gaze. I am not suggesting that the writers I study here applied the term
typographic imaginary to their works. Its significance lies in its use as a
descriptor of literary strategies and a category of critical analysis.5

Implications
The typographic imaginary is a function of texts’ analyses of their origins in
a changing media landscape. As a theory it both elucidates the preoccupa-
tions of separate authors and newly articulates a discernible current within
the literature of the late medieval and early modern periods. I argue that
by better appreciating writers’ figurations and fantasies of the print milieu
we can better understand how the culture imagined that milieu and its sig-
nificance. The typographic imaginary produces texts that can be described
by N. Katherine Hayles’s term, ‘technotext’: a text that ‘interrogates the
inscription technology that produces it’ (2002, p. 25). That interrogation
arouses insights into print culture that are sometimes contradictory. On
one hand, talking about print becomes a means of talking through bigger
debates. Print (both as a medium and as a subject of discussion) has a port-
manteau quality in its ability to contain an assemblage of topics. When print
is invoked discursively it replicates its material qualities – the whole point
of moveable type is that it can carry any topic in any arrangement. Writers
talk about printing when they want to explore other issues through it, such
as humanism, the value of romance, the spread of literacy. On the other
hand, the typographic imaginary reveals that print was a topic in its own
right. This demonstrates that print was not taken for granted; its culture
was being written about as it was developing and not simply in order to be
‘stigmatized as a mercenary métier’ (Eisenstein 2011, p. 3). It was engaged
as a subject of study, an area of education, and – most of all – a source
of imaginative inspiration. Close analysis of fictionalisations of the print
trade reveals that one of the ways that printing became more established
and respected as a media form over the course of the sixteenth century was
its figurative reproduction. This needs to be emphasised as it is a factor of
print culture that we have not fully appreciated. The authors I discuss dem-
onstrate an awareness in their works that print was not merely a tool to be
used but a subject to be addressed in a particular way. At the same time,
ambivalence about print grows alongside celebrations of its creativity and
potential. Over the sixteenth century, expressions increase about the alienat-
ing, disgusting, and overwhelming quality of print and about the fact that
the speedy proliferation of printed material could result in authors’ precious
and hard-won creations being ignored or turned to waste paper.
6 Introduction
The typographic imaginary also exposes how early modern print culture
articulates the broader value of printed texts, but not always in the ways
that we might expect. Texts were perceived to change in value as they moved
between forms. Commentators certainly feared that print would produce
cultural decline because it spread error, could be of a poor quality, and its
quantity was simply overwhelming. But texts are also shown to be anything
but debased when they move into print; they rather accrue alternative value
because they spread the word beyond traditional structures and they can
be bought by anyone with enough money to do so. When print culture
moves literature out of the restricted arena of manuscript circulation and
into the open marketplace, it demonstrates its progressive impulse. This is
a recognised gradual outcome of printing that is visible most influentially
in accounts of the public sphere and of printing’s role in the creation of the
imagined communities of nationalism (Habermas 2013; Anderson 2006). It
was not, though, a smooth and inevitable outcome, as Jesse Lander’s work
on printed religious polemic attests: ‘it acts as a powerful social solvent
at the very same time that it constitutes new communities’ (2006, p. 19).
Significantly, though, print’s progressive potential is part of the discourse
about it at a very early stage – starting with the first book printed in English,
William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1473. Some texts
thematise their existence outside of traditional socio-cultural structures, and
within new and alternative space where literature is more accessible because
it is printed. Writers including Caxton, Richard Tottel, and Gascoigne invite
readers to confront the effects of this in the imaginative worlds that they
create. By talking about print’s potential, in print, and posing older sys-
tems as spaces that they are leaving behind, these texts lead the reader into
imagining alternative social and cultural paradigms and new values of wide
dissemination, broad audience, and market power. They create liberatory
imaginative space that is typographically derived. Early modern culture
develops a value-laden rhetoric of the printed book, and the typographic
imaginary helps us to see that in formation.
Print trade personnel are some of the most significant agents within that
rhetoric because they become culturally highly visible over the course of
the sixteenth century. The typographic imaginary reveals the importance
of the printer or stationer as a figure in the cultural imagination. These
were the agents who reproduced the work and had financial control over
it; they exerted power over discourse and over capital. Texts adopting the
typographic imaginary often recognise printers and stationers as producers
who make and shape the text in a way that facilitates its dissemination.
The ready reproducibility of the printed book also means that the work of
those producers spreads far and wide along with that of the author. Some-
times the producer of the book and the writer of the words are one and the
same; still, the texts play out a process of negotiation between the roles. The
imaginative power of the printer or stationer figure is recognised early on,
even though there are tensions in the ways that they are portrayed that often
 Introduction 7
involve a struggle with the author. In texts written by print trade person-
nel, or in which they are ventriloquised, several important things are evi-
dent. Print workers are creatively conscious of their labour and their agency,
and they publicly articulate a sense of printing’s value from the inception
of printing in English. By foregrounding the agents of the trade, the typo-
graphic imaginary deepens our understanding of the specific ways in which
print was socially unsettling. This is, in part, because it talks about the care-
fully calibrated, and sometimes uncomfortable, social relationships in and
around the print shop. If the creation of the printed book was always a col-
laborative activity between the writer, the funding stationer, and the agents
who set the type and pulled the press, this collaboration was not always
easy. Co-production could be harmonious, but it was sometimes tense. The
typographic imaginary gives us a new understanding of the ways in which
printing put literary authority into crisis as the social and creative condi-
tions of writing were renegotiated.
This book’s description of the typographic imaginary, and the theorisa-
tion of early print culture that it supports, needs to be accompanied by a
certain emphasis: writing about writing is not unique to print culture. Had
I titled this project the Chirographic Imaginary it would have been a more
straightforward task. Scribes are the closest analogy that manuscript cul-
ture offers to the press machine as a mode of production and the printer or
stationer as its agent, and they occupy a curious space as both technology
and agent of reproduction. With their characteristic equipment of pens and
inkhorns being readily available for suggestive wordplay, medieval and early
modern scribes and clerks frequently provide topics for satire or open criti-
cism. They are portrayed as torturers, tricksters, lascivious interlopers (such
as Gascoigne’s Secretary in A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Mas-
ter F.J.), and even pimps.6 Chaucer famously blights his copyist with ‘the
scalle’ (1988, l.3) in the exasperated lyric ‘Wordes unto Adam, His Owne
Scriveyn’.7 Chaucer is an especially prominent example of an author who
(as I discuss in Chapter 2) is strongly associated with early English printing,
but for decades he was disseminated in manuscript and his texts were com-
posed in a culture that was scribal and oral. Jamie Fumo has recently identi-
fied in his works a ‘compositional consciousness’ that pays ‘attention to the
construction of authorship and material textuality’ (2015, p. 80). Reading
the Book of the Duchess (ca. 1372), an elegiac dream vision in which the
dreamer upon awaking states that he will ‘put this sweven in ryme’ (1988,
l.1332), she finds it to be a poem heavily invested in contemplating its own
making. For Fumo, the relation of the two central figures, a Man in Black
and the deceased Duchess named Blanche (White), allegorises ‘the inscrip-
tion of black words on a white page’ (Fumo 2015, p. 91). Here Chaucer
uses the poem to ‘reflect on “the book” as a subject in its own right’ (Fumo
2015, p. 104).8 This line of thought about Chaucer follows Seth Lerer’s
influential statement of the self-consciousness of fifteenth-century liter-
ary culture, especially in its fantasies of poetic making and ‘invention of a
8 Introduction
laureate Chaucer and his aureate past’ (1993, p. 24). For Chaucer’s follow-
ers, these imaginings are ‘a complex and historically definable attempt to
understand the social place of literature and the obligations of the writer’
(1993, p. 24). There are clear parallels here with the priorities of the typo-
graphic imaginary.
Writing about textual production was taking place for centuries before
printing, and writing about scribal practices continued well into the early
modern period.9 A glance at the plots of the period’s drama or the speak-
ers of its lyric poetry reveals the preponderance of metatextual moments
that dwell on writing and reading. In Astrophil and Stella, for example, Sir
Philip Sidney’s persona, Astrophil, describes his writer’s block by reporting
that he ‘sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe’ and portrays
himself ‘biting’ his ‘truant pen’ before he eventually puts that pen to paper
(1591, sig.A.2.).10 Yet, there is a particularly anxious quality to writing
about printing that simultaneously elevates the visibility of print trade per-
sonnel and maligns their practices. For example, despite their comparable
roles and their overlapping tools, scribes and printers, scriptoria and print
shops, were not equated symbolically. Two distinctions especially pertain to
their characterisation and their environment. As Eisenstein points out, the
‘sinister figure of the exploitative capitalist’ lacks an ‘equivalent in stories
about scribes and copyists’ (2011, p. 4), and early modern commentators
emphasise ‘the difference between the peaceful scriptorium and the infernal
din of the printing shop’ (2011, p. 26).11 Whilst there are similarities in the
ways that manuscript and print writers reflect on the tools and dilemmas
of their creative activities, the differences are significant. As we shall see,
print both amplifies existing trends and adds new forms and figures to the
symbolic range.
There are several reasons for the increased level of anxiety shown in texts
that reflect on printing. The most prominent is the increased visibility of the
book when print boosts textual production and the consequent fear of the
spread of error. In 1608 Hieronymus Hornschuch, a German press correc-
tor, published a guidebook for his colleagues. He writes that ‘nothing else
was so fruitful in every kind of mistake, in which the books of some of the
ancient writers still abound, as the negligence of scribes’ (1972, p. 31). He
goes on to add that ‘if care were not taken’ in printing, ‘not one mistake, but
a thousand, or fifteen hundred, or two thousand individual mistakes would
be printed in the space of five hours’ (1972, p. 31). Hornschuch is pointing
out that mistakes are common in manuscript books, but in printing these
can be multiplied to great quantities at great speed. As Hornschuch’s worry
about rapid amplification suggests, increased volume could also entail a
fear of loss of control.12 There were more intermediaries in the process of
bringing a text to print than when having it copied, which offered more
opportunities for something to go wrong. Such errors could be exposed
to greater numbers of readers, which gave writers additional scope to be
misunderstood. This was less of a problem in manuscript circulation. There
 Introduction 9
was a degree of anonymity to the commercial London trade in vernacu-
lar manuscripts, but this trade remained commission-based (Kuskin 2006,
p. 6; Gillespie 2006, p. 42). Manuscript circulation retained a more personal
sense of community, its books implying ‘a unique material act of produc-
tion potentially localizable in time and space’ (Hanna 1996, p. 7). And as
Alexandra Gillespie argues, even when a commercial manuscript trade was
active, authors continued to evoke ‘intimate and traditional accounts of
book production’ (2006, p. 42). Fifteenth-century writers including Thomas
Hoccleve and John Lydgate do this when they portray themselves as ‘shar-
ing in the coteries of Chaucerian making’ (Lerer 1993, p. 18). By contrast,
when Caxton in 1478 writes about Chaucer critically for the first time in
print he does not associate him with remembered community. He describes
his tomb and the inscription on it which is purportedly written by ‘Stepha-
num Surigonum’ (Caxton 1973, p. 60), poet laureate of Milan. With this
move, according to Lerer, Caxton aligns Chaucer with ‘the dead auctores
of the Continental humanist tradition’ (Lerer 1993, p. 148) and thereby
mutually distances him and his readership.13 Mass production and the social
dislocation of the author from his or her audience helped print to work a
depersonalising and monumentalising effect.
This alienating effect sometimes transpires as print’s intervention between
writer and audience. Owing to the need to create markets for the productive
capacity of the press, new forms developed including title pages and errata
sheets (as in Taylor’s ‘Faults Escap’d’). Writers’ presentation of their works
to the world was increasingly mediated by the printer or stationer, as I show
in Chapter 2’s discussion of print trade dialogue. This meant that writers
were sometimes required to alter those works: ‘printing put a heavily capi-
talized (and hence powerful) intermediation between writers and readers,
authors and audiences, that had not been there before and that, moreover,
had peculiar needs of its own shaping its participation in the system’ (Carl-
son 2006, p. 51). For instance, printers developed titlepages as a means to
label and effectively market their wares but for authors the titlepage facili-
tates a paradoxical effect. Even accounting for the early modern delight in
identity games and pseudo-anonymity, and the ongoing use of compilations
and Sammelbände, the print market was increasingly invested in named
authors and individual titles.14 This differs from medieval manuscript cul-
ture in which ‘relatively few Middle English texts consistently circulated
in isolation’ and ‘fewer still in contexts that might be construed as author-
centred’ (Hanna 1996, p. 8). Printed authors could be socially disconnected
from their audience but more vulnerable to be identified to that audience as
the maker of a particular work.
Alteration in the structure of the book trade was also a factor. There
was a move towards increasing regulation. As Henry Woudhuysen points
out, the naming of an individual author could have material implications
because ‘a closer official eye was [. . .] kept on such a public activity as
printing than on the more discreet business of copying manuscripts’ (1996,
10 Introduction
p. 12); for that reason, manuscript was often preferred for sensitive texts
such as libels.15 The trade gradually changed from a bespoke ‘to a truly
speculative business; from [. . .] loose networks of amateur and professional,
metropolitan, and household scribes and booksellers [. . .] to an important
for-profit industry increasingly linked to the powerful London Company of
Stationers’ (Gillespie 2006, p. 66). The Crown patronised the press from
its early years through privileges and patents, but this also acted as a de
facto control mechanism because it promoted or suppressed certain kinds
of texts. Once the Stationers’ Company received its royal charter in 1557,
books were increasingly subjected to registration, licensing and later eccle-
siastical licensing and censorship. With its official monopoly, the company
was sanctioned to protect the economic privileges of the corporation by
controlling competition.16 These influences, whilst they primarily benefitted
printers and stationers, resulted in conditions for authors that were increas-
ingly controlled and subject to the exertion of external authority.
In addition to its emerging monetary and formal imperatives, there is
evidence for the mechanics of print being perceived to contrast unfavour-
ably with the more fluid activity of writing. Inside the printing house, to
make words out of movable type, a compositor would arrange tiny bitty
pieces of metal upside down and back to front, which would then be applied
to a large machine of wood and metal (I discuss the precise technology in
Chapter 1):

the typesetter’s hand operates in a series of discrete movements,

selecting unique sorts from the finite numbers of compartments in a
typecase [. . .] the individual choices they face are defined from the
beginning: for each letter, the typesetter chooses among the same 50
or 300 compartments.
(Dane 2011, p. 3)

This is different from writing: ‘scribes [. . .] produce their lines in a contin-

uum [. . .] They can change handwriting styles and handwriting conventions
at will’ (Dane 2011, p. 3).17 Comments made by Sir Thomas Smith in A
Dialogue of the Correct and Improved Writing of English (1568) illuminate
some of the differences. Reporting on his composition process, he states, ‘I
have frequently changed my mind, have written, blotted out, rewritten, and
crossed out again’ (1983, p. 25); writing is malleable, readily available for
alteration by a writer who presents himself deeply engaged in the creative
and editorial process. We do not have to resort to a misleading idea of fixity
to see that print cannot be changed at source in the same way. Revealingly,
Smith goes on to say, ‘nor do I like people who hurry into print, like women
giving premature birth’ (1983, p. 25); he presents printing as ill considered,
unhealthy, and potentially stunting. Despite all of this, writers had begun
to operate in a culture in which literary authority was not only shifting to
the printing press but could also have the institutional authority of licensing
 Introduction 11
imposed on it. Printing changed the conditions of the literary system, which
changed how authors experienced and described their role within it.
The typographic imaginary thus shows the cultural elevation of the print
trade and simultaneously registers acute anxiety about its practices, yet
there is no rigid line between figurations of print and manuscript produc-
tion. Just as electronic texts have not overnight replaced the printed book,
print did not instantly (indeed has never) completely replaced manuscript.
Certain genres, such as poems on affairs of state and political romances, in
fact, flourished in manuscript well into the seventeenth century (Beal 1998,
pp. 19–20; Humphrey Newcomb 2011, p. 366).18 As many of the analyses
that follow demonstrate, along with a wealth of book historical evidence,
writers do not conceive of these media as unilateral forms.19 Writers do,
however, often place textual forms on a continuum and they do dwell on the
significances of moving along that continuum from manuscript to print.20
Some of the most provocative recent work on medieval manuscripts is now
recognising that it is not only possible but also desirable to delineate the
contours of manuscript culture as distinct from print culture and to read
manuscript books as different in kind from printed ones (Johnson and Van
Dussen 2015, pp. 4–5). Focusing on depictions of individual media forms
within the metatextual weave that surrounds them is an entirely appropriate
way to make those forms visible as an object of analysis.

Critical mapping
Neither book history nor literary studies has taken enough account of imag-
inative depictions of the print trade and their potential to teach us about
cultural responses to the technology. This study seeks to fill that gap. In
the introduction to a recent collection of essays, Heidi Brayman, Jesse M.
Lander, and Zachary Lesser write that

it is precisely because we no longer need to make the argument that

early modern literary works exist always and only in their material
instantiations that the contributors to this volume can treat the history
of the book less as a topic than as a methodology.
(Brayman et al 2016, p. 12)

Building on this, they trace a second wave of book history that is interested
less in proving the importance of materiality than in grounding the analysis
of discourse within individual historical moments. For Brayman, Lander,
and Lesser, the object of study is both the book and individual interactions
with it; they argue that the ‘idea of language as rhetoric, as historically
situated event’, is what material texts studies have to offer (Brayman et al
2016, p. 13). Thus, their collection addresses ‘the circulation of meaning
among specific authors, stationers, readers, book buyers, dedicatees [. . .] by
means of the specific rhetorical genres of early modern textual culture – the
12 Introduction
book in history’ (Brayman et al 2016, p. 14). A useful summation of the
field is offered by Brayman, Lander, and Lesser’s introduction. I would add,
however, that there is another area of development within book historical
scholarship that sits slightly apart from the two strands that they delineate
and which The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Litera-
ture occupies: a focus on figurative representations of the book trade. This
scholarship pays attention to the agency and status of printers and printing
houses, mobilising knowledge about what books looked and felt like and
how they were made. It responds to traces of these things in the imaginative
register of texts and therefore engages detailed close reading, dwelling often
on personae, paratexts, intertextuality, and literary genealogies. In these
endeavours critics are easing the tension that Patricia Pender and Rosalind
Smith articulate: ‘book history will sometimes ignore the rhetorical claims
and literary impact of the books it studies, while conventional literary criti-
cism can often take for granted the book as a self-evident, and singular,
material artefact’ (2014, p. 4).21
There is growing critical interest in this figurative representation but
no conceptual framework as yet to appreciate it as a significant literary
strategy. Most recently, Kathleen Tonry’s study demonstrates the agency of
early printers by considering the ‘personality of print’ (2016, p. 14). Crit-
ics including Frederick Kiefer (1996), Charlotte Scott (2007), Helen Smith
(2008), and Harry Newman (2018) notice theatrical sensitivity to the pro-
cesses of reading and writing generally and the presence of print imagery
and printed material on the stage.22 Louise Wilson finds that in the writings
of Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, ‘the mechanisms of print produc-
tion are exposed to the reader-purchaser’ (2013, p. 8). Chettle’s fashioning
of ‘an identity for the printer and the print process’ is similarly important
for John Jowett (2003, p. 159). Newman, furthermore, identifies a genre of
‘book-trade epigrams’ that ‘focus on the production, sale and/or reception
of books, often highlighting their status as material commodities’ (2013,
p. 23), while Lindsay Ann Reid addresses ‘the historical conditions of the
book trade as represented within literature’ (2014, p. 4).23 Wonder-inducing
books are at the heart of Sarah Wall-Randell’s study. She is emphatically
interested in the ‘immaterial potential’ (2013, p. 3) of represented books,
but her intent resonates here because she sees her work to be complementing
‘histories of the material book [. . .], using the information they have gath-
ered about how “real” historical readers experienced books as material phe-
nomena to return critics’ attention to the books that are represented within
literary texts’ (2013, p. 3). Extending well into the eighteenth century, the
idea that certain prominent writers imaginatively enfold the printing trade is
well established. With reference to Alexander Pope (whom I briefly discuss
in the Conclusion), Laura Brown writes that the ‘attack on the capitaliza-
tion of the printing industry and hence of literature itself is the main explicit
enterprise of The Dunciad’ (1985, p. 130), whilst Jack Lynch finds that
Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–81) contains detailed accounts
 Introduction 13
of his poets’ dealings with the ‘institutions of print’ (2015, p. 97). Later
still, Andrew Piper’s work on Romantic literature defines a ‘bibliographic
poetics – a coherent set of stylistic and formal concerns – that attempt to
make the medium of the book intelligible’ (2013, p. 11). These critics notice
authorial strategies that participate in the typographic imaginary’s cluster of
interests: the development of a recognisable poetics from fictionalisations of
print mechanisms, of the bookselling milieu and its personnel. This study
reveals a poetics of print to be operative in English literature from print-
ing’s inception in the language and offers a framework for analysis of that
concern.
Amongst this existing research, the important work of Lisa Maruca is the
most provocative for this book. In The Work of Print: Authorship and the
English Text Trades, 1660–1760, Maruca is concerned to make the tech-
nology of printing visible within texts produced by printers and booksell-
ers, showing how those texts ‘produce authorizing representations of print
workers themselves, along with their technologies’ (2007, p. 11). Maruca’s
project is explicitly revisionary. She aims to correct an author-centric version
of literary history by demonstrating that print trade personnel saw print
products as ‘the result of a collaboration of many hands and the process
of textual production to include not only writing but also the work – and
workers – of technology’ (2007, pp. 7, 17–18). I am in conversation with
Maruca at several points in the following chapters, and whilst I reinforce
some of her conclusions, I nuance others. My discussion of print trade man-
uals in Chapter 1 reveals print personnel to be making their medium visible,
actively reflecting on its properties and problems, at a far earlier stage than
Maruca accounts for. Texts that engage the typographic imaginary recur on
moments of co-production, but, as I argue in Chapter 3 on print trade dia-
logue, this often results in scenes of tension rather than collaboration. As the
most extensive study to date of the figurative agency of the print trade, The
Work of Print is conceptually foundational to the idea of the typographic
imaginary, and it is a text that deserves to become more central in print
culture studies.
This book is also triangulated with the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein,
whose writings continue to be influential. It is not, however, The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change that I engage but, rather, her recent study
Divine Art, Infernal Machine: The Reception of Printing in the West from
First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending (2011). Eisenstein’s book is
about the rhetoric in historical accounts of printing from its earliest days
through the nineteenth-century ‘zenith of print culture’ (2011, p. 153) and
the twenty-first-century rise of the newspaper. The Typographic Imaginary
in Early Modern English Literature is about rhetoric but, particularly,
rhetoric within fictionalisations of the trade. There is a fine and perme-
able line between my subject matter and Eisenstein’s; however, my analy-
ses are especially attentive to literary effects. Consequently, by looking in
close detail at the texture of late medieval and early modern print trade
14 Introduction
portrayals, I reach some different conclusions. Eisenstein finds that ‘with
the coming of iron and steam, the age of the hand press came to an end.
Renaissance tributes to a divine art were replaced by tributes to a mighty
engine of progress’ (2011, p. 244). This book shows that valedictory rheto-
ric to be severely compromised by the middle of the sixteenth century,
with alienation and horror already present in depictions of the press. At
the same time, the figure of the printer is more layered and enabling than
Eisenstein’s description of profiteering and ‘villainous’ (2011, p. 244)
fifteenth-century printers and the unscrupulous booksellers that are their
eighteenth-century descendants.
An especially important thinker informing this study is William Kuskin,
writing on Caxton and the emergence of printing within fifteenth-century
literary culture. Kuskin’s overall project is to resist the narrative of rupture
that characterises some accounts of English literary history and, particu-
larly, the association within that of print with an incipient brilliant moder-
nity and manuscript with a retrograde medieval opacity. He seeks to move
beyond the series of oppositions that he thinks dogs scholarship on print:
fixity/variation, manuscript scarcity/print abundance, and sudden change/
progressive change (2008, p. 8). Kuskin promotes an understanding of
books as both symbols and material objects: ‘setting out ideas in a mate-
rial form, they present a unified statement greater than the sum of their
parts’ (2008, p. 5). By this he means that the printed book offers an imag-
ined unity; it aggregates discursive multiplicity into material wholeness.
He proposes ‘symbolic bibliography’ (2008, p. 5) as a method of reading
that acknowledges the jointly material and intellectual process of meaning
making from books. This has clear affinities with the typographic imagi-
nary. Kuskin’s astute understanding of the printed book exposes its essen-
tial paradoxicality:

the early book is a machined object and as such registers an immedi-

ate break into industry demanding a new categorical definition; with
equal emphasis, however, it is tied to the past. Ultimately, the paradox
suggests that the medieval book is an object of historic difference, and
is alienated from its mode of production even as it is connected to the
modern, identical objects we are familiar with today.
(2006, p. 4)

This study embraces the paradoxicality of the printed book which, for Kus-
kin, offers only a critical ‘mystification capable of justifying modernity’s
sense of itself as defined by historical rupture’ (2006, p. 6). I would soften
this conclusion. It is productive to retain an awareness of the unresolved
juxtapositions that Kuskin identifies – ‘craft skills against industry, small-
scale trading against speculative investment, anonymity against identity, and
continuity against change’ (2006, p. 5) – and to do so mitigates against a
reductive binary of periods.
 Introduction 15
As a way out of the print/modernity impasse that he sees, Kuskin argues
that scholarship should pay better attention to the fifteenth century. He pos-
its, extremely persuasively, that English literary production in the fifteenth
century had articulated intellectual and practical structures for vernacular
writing that printing ‘infused [. . .] with volume’ (2008, p. 3). As a result
of this ‘material increase in volume’ the symbolic potency of books altered
and ‘given the symbolic nature of the book, this simultaneously created an
imaginative change’ (2008, p. 3).24 He is suggesting that within continu-
ity (the existing structures for production) there was change (the increase
in volume that print facilitated): print operates with a double action that
appropriates past authority and consolidates it into a new object, which is,
in turn, geared for subsequent reproduction (2008, p. 17). Kuskin recog-
nises the important point that a book produced by print does not mean the
same as a book produced in manuscript:

print appears according to the manuscript format, but this does not
obviate the fact of its difference. Its material difference is simultane-
ously a symbolic difference. This transformation is fraught and at times
paradoxical but is nevertheless a history that remains to be told.
(2008, p. 12)

Kuskin conceives the ‘symbolic nature of the book’ not as ‘the discrete rhe-
torical symbols of a work’ but as ‘the way the various elements of produc-
tion come together’ (2008, pp. 25–6) to create materially whole signifying
objects. The history that my book seeks to tell alongside Kuskin is precisely
the story of printing’s difference within the figurative representations made
by the text. His more recent work takes the idea of appropriated and repro-
duced authority and develops it into recursion, a trope he borrows from
computing to describe ‘a process of return that produces representation
through embedded self-reference’, involving a ‘return to the past through
the physical text’ (2013, pp. 32, 44).25 He writes that books are ‘recursive
in that their textual forms embed earlier textual forms within them’ (2013,
p. 49). Rather than being related to technological change, this is a process
that flows across and between media. It parallels two areas of the typo-
graphic imaginary, most obviously, the way in which printed texts are aware
of and allude to the other textual forms that surround them and secondly,
the way that they evoke the typographic aesthetics of earlier named models.
Kuskin too perceives that for early modern writers there is a set of shared
codes for talking about printing.
The current critical awareness of symbolic depictions of the book trade
thus emerges at an intersection of critical and literary historical projects.
Alongside Lerer’s work on Chaucer, landmark studies on the signifying
power of the book by medieval scholars such as Jesse Gellrich (1985) on the
book of nature, Eric Jager (2000) on the book of the heart, and Mary Car-
ruthers (2008) on the book of memory form a complementary context.26
16 Introduction
The typographic imaginary is a theory of representation but, in exploring
fictionalisations of material practices and objects, it is inspired by the mate-
rial turn. Current studies of material cultures are conducting a transdisci-
plinary exploration of the objects that societies produce, especially within,
or at the fringes of, capitalism.27 Not only are printing and capital insepa-
rable, but, made and held by pre-industrial late medieval and early modern
people, printed books were amongst the first mechanically mass-produced
objects.28 The printed book has a special significance in the history of
objects, but, simultaneously, the quotidian nature of printed matter gives it
the potential to be erased as a transparent medium. The typographic imagi-
nary, however, shows authors resisting that potential erasure and drawing
attention to a technology and a medium that were new and strange. One
of the key ways that early modern literary scholars have thought through
materiality is by paying attention to the ways that texts are framed by
their paratexts, the inseparable dynamism between the two, and the care-
ful rhetorical performances that paratexts stage.29 Paratexts are especially
prominent in the chapters that follow because they frequently contain com-
mentary by the author or the printer about the text and the processes that
have created it.
The role of the paratext as a vehicle of printerly commentary points to
a further strand of scholarship that supports this book: studies arguing for
the creative and discursive agency of the print trade. Here it is Shakespeare
scholars that have led the way, with revisionary research by Lukas Erne
(2005 and 2013) and others resituating Shakespeare within book trade
practices and overturning the contention that he was solely a man of the
theatre with little concern for his printed output.30 This research explores
both how he operated within the book trade and, importantly, the role of
stationers in shaping ‘Shakespeare’ the printed commodity.31 Still focusing
on drama, Sonia Massai and Lesser have developed our sense of the spe-
cialised but culturally influential practices in which print trade personnel
engaged. Massai identifies the category of the ‘annotating reader’ (2007,
p. 30) to describe the editorial agents who prepared dramatic copy for
the press before the term editor was available.32 Lesser’s study (2007) of
seventeenth-century publishing strategies emphasises publishers’ creation,
and cultivation of, particular readerships for their products in a process
which both decentres the author and foregrounds the agent of the press.
These critics emphasise in different ways the discerning reading practices
of print personnel. Where Massai insists on the ‘familiarity with the fic-
tive world of the play’ that annotating readers needed, Lesser proposes
that publishers undertook ‘speculative reading’ to determine a text’s ‘larger
cultural meanings’ (2007, pp. 9, 37), the extent to which it fit with their
specialties, and whether it was a viable commercial prospect. By elevating
awareness of the print trade and excavating evidence for its operations, this
thinking provides crucial historical and critical background for my study.
The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature moves this
Another random document with
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Reform Bills equals that of his Jew Bills, or the volumes of his Biography
of Moore! He seems to think that the story of the Sybilline books was
written expressly for his guidance and conduct, and that he is entitled,
after each successive failure and rebuff, to charge the constitution with an
additional per centage of radicalism by way of penalty. He becomes louder
and broader in his demands whenever they are negatived or postponed,
and seems in the fair way to adopt some of the views of the Chartists.
We do not say this lightly—by way of banter—or in regard of general
political disagreement. We never, at any time, reposed much faith in the
judgment or sagacity of Lord John Russell; and, of late years, our opinion
of him, in these respects, has, we confess, materially declined. We have
been, in our own sphere of action, engaged in most of the political
struggles which have taken place within the memory of the present
generation; and we trust that these have not passed by without some
wholesome lessons. To change of opinion, where honestly induced and
through conviction, every one is bound to be fair and lenient; because,
undeniably, in our own day there has been a great unravelment of social
questions, and mere party prejudice is no longer allowed to be paramount.
Perhaps the only living statesman of eminence, who cleaves to the old
system, and is inveterate in his addiction to party intrigue, and what he
calls “tradition,” is Lord John Russell. Put him into Utopia, and his first
thought would be how he might establish the exclusive supremacy of the
Whigs. He is so much and so inveterately a party man, that he seems to
care little what becomes of the country, provided only that he, and his, sit
at the receipt of customs. He showed that long ago—not in the days of his
hot youth, but in those of his pragmatic manhood. He—the Whig
Constitutionalist—characterised the opinion of the Upper House as “the
whisper of a faction;” and did not disdain the violent and frantic sympathy
of mobs when such demonstrations tended to his own particular purpose,
or aided the ascendancy of his party. Ever since he has pursued the same
course. No man can tell when he is in thorough earnest, or when he is not.
He invited, by word and deed, Papal aggression; and, when the aggression
came, he started up at once, as an indignant Protestant champion, and
flung down his diminutive gauntlet, in name of Great Britain, to the Pope!
And yet, at the bidding of the Irish Roman Catholic phalanx, we find this
second Luther a strenuous supporter of Maynooth, and of the nunneries!
Had his ancestor John, the first Lord Russell—who in 1540, and 1550,
obtained grants from the Crown of the possessions of the Abbey of
Tavistock and the Monastery of Woburn—been equally zealous for the
protection of convents, he probably would have remained, as he was born,
an utterly unacred gentleman.
 The proposed Reform Bill of 1852 did not attract a large share of the
public attention, and that for two reasons. In the first place, the country
was quite apathetic on the subject; and in the second place, it was
introduced at a time when the Whigs were tottering to their fall.
Nevertheless, it is a remarkable document, inasmuch as we may conclude
it to embody the experiences and observation of Lord John Russell upon
the working of our representative system during a period of exactly twenty
years. That there should have been some defects in the machinery of the
engine which he invented in 1832, is not wonderful; nor can we call him
rash for essaying, after so long an interval, to remedy these defects
according to the best of his judgment. His position in 1852 was this:—He
told the House, that he, the mechanist of 1832, was now prepared, from
the results of twenty years’ observation, to introduce certain
improvements which would have the effect, for a long time coming, of
preventing the necessity of any further change. The improvements he
proposed were these:—The qualification in towns was to be reduced from
£10 to £5; and in counties from £50 to £20. Every man paying 40s. a-year
of direct taxes was to be entitled to vote. There was to be no
disfranchisement of boroughs, but the smaller ones were to receive an
infusion of fresh blood by the incorporation of adjoining villages. No
property qualification was to be required for members, and the
parliamentary oaths were to be modified, so as to allow the admission of
Jews and other unbelievers in the Christian faith. Such were the chief
features of the proposed measure of 1852, as laid before the House of
Commons by Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister. Wise or unwise,
they were the conclusions which he had formed as to the change necessary
to be made in the English representative system; and we must assume that
he had not formed them without due thought and matured investigation.
That both the necessity for, and the nature of the change were seriously
considered by him and his colleagues in the Cabinet, it would be unfair
and irrational to doubt; and we must therefore hold that the provisions of
the bill were regarded by them not only as wise and salutary, but as the
very best which their collective wisdom could devise.
If, in 1852, this bill had been rejected by a majority of the House of
Commons, Lord John might either have remodelled it, so as to meet the
more obvious objections, or have again introduced it, without alteration,
for the consideration of another parliament. But it was not rejected by the
House, and its merits were never thoroughly discussed throughout the
country. It was, as we have said, introduced at a time when the Whig
ministry were obviously in the death throes, and in February of that year
they tendered their resignation. The bill accordingly fell to the ground
before judgment could be pronounced upon it. The public at large seemed
to care nothing about it. There was no enthusiasm manifested at its
introduction, and no disappointment expressed at its withdrawal.
The scheme, therefore, of 1852, was not only untried but uncondemned.
Nothing had occurred that could reasonably shake the confidence of the
deviser in its prudence, correctness, or aptitude for the necessities of the
country; unless we are to suppose that he felt somewhat disappointed by
the exceedingly cold and indifferent nature of its reception. That, however,
could not be taken as any distinct criterion of its merits. We are not to
suppose that Lord John Russell, in framing that bill, merely looked to the
popularity which he and his party might attain thereby, or the future
advantages which it might secure to them. We are bound, on the contrary,
to assume that he, being then Premier, and in the very highest responsible
position, was acting in perfectly good faith, and had embodied in the bill
the results of his long experience and observation.
Now, mark what follows. In 1853, he again pledges himself to introduce
a measure for the amendment of the Parliamentary representation; and
redeems his pledge by bringing out, early in 1854, a measure totally
different from that which he recommended in 1852! The great points of
difference are these: By the one, the boroughs were to be preserved, and in
some cases enlarged; by the other, they are to be disfranchised to the
amount of sixty-six members. The bill of 1852 maintained the distinction
between town and county qualification—that of 1854 abolishes such
distinction. The first proceeded upon the plain principle that majorities
alone were to be represented—the second, in special cases, assigns a
member to minorities. In short, the two bills have no kind of family
resemblance. They are not parallel, but entirely antagonistic schemes; and
it is almost impossible, after perusing them both, to believe that they are
the productions of the same statesman.
Nothing, it will be conceded on all hands, has occurred during the last
two years, to justify such an extraordinary change of sentiment. We have
had in the interim a general election, the result of which has been that a
Coalition Ministry, numbering Lord John Russell among its members, is
presently in power. Trade, we are told, is in the highest degree flourishing;
and the prosperity of the country has been made a topic of distinct
congratulation. Search as closely as you please, you will find no external
reason to account for so prodigious a change of opinion. The potato-rot
and famine were the visible reasons assigned for Sir Robert Peel’s change
of opinion on the subject of protective duties—but what reasons can Lord
John Russell propound for this prodigious wrench at the constitution? He
cannot say that the proposals in both his bills are sound, safe, and
judicious. The one belies and utterly condemns the other. If his last idea of
disfranchising and reducing sixty-six English borough constituencies is a
just one, he must have erred grievously in 1852 when he proposed to
retain them. So with the other provisions. If he intends to maintain that he
has now hit upon the true remedy, he must perforce admit that he has
acquired more wisdom in 1853 than was vouchsafed him during the
twenty previous years of his political career. He must admit that he was
totally and egregiously wrong in 1852; and he has no loophole for apology
on the ground of intervening circumstances. Really we do not believe that
there is a parallel instance of a British minister having voluntarily placed
himself in such a predicament. How is it possible that he can expect his
friends, independent of the mere official staff, to support, in 1854, a
measure diametrically opposite to that which was propounded in 1852?
No wonder that Earl Grey and other influential Whigs are most desirous
to have the measure withdrawn without provoking a regular discussion.
Some of them may not have approved of the former bill; but those who did
so, or who were at all events willing to have let it pass, can hardly, if they
wish to be consistent, give their sanction to the present one. It is not Lord
John Russell alone who is compromised; he is compromising the whole of
his party. If they thought him right in 1852, they must think him wrong in
1854; for he cannot point to the smallest intervening fact to justify his
change of principle. And if they think him wrong, how can they possibly
support him? We do not believe that he can reckon on the support of the
high-minded Whigs of England. They have principle and honour and
character to maintain; and we think it exceedingly improbable that they
will allow themselves to be swept into the howling Maëlstrom of
Radicalism. Rather than that, we venture to predict that they will toss the
rash little pilot, whose incapacity and want of knowledge are now self-
confessed, overboard, and trust to the direction of an abler and more
consistent member of the crew.
Be that as it may, we must try if possible to ascertain what cause has
operated to produce this singular and rapid change in the opinions, or
rather convictions, of Lord John Russell on the subject of Parliamentary
Reform. As we have said already, there are no external circumstances,
either apparent or alleged, to account for it. The boroughs have done
nothing to subject them to the penalty of disfranchisement; the counties
have done nothing to entitle them to a considerable addition of members.
To use diplomatic language, the status quo has been rigidly observed.
Well, then, in the absence of any such tangible reason, we must
necessarily fall back upon motives, the first of which is the advice and
representation of confederates.
 We at once acquit Lord Aberdeen and the majority of the Cabinet of any
real participation in the scheme of Lord John Russell. What may be the
mind of Sir James Graham and Sir William Molesworth on the subject, we
cannot tell, but we are tolerably sure that no other minister regards the
bill with favour. Even the members of the Manchester party do not seem
to consider it as an especial boon. Mr Bright knows well enough that a
new reform bill, if carried, cannot be disturbed for a number of years to
come; and as this one does not come up to his expectations, he is ready to
oppose it. Indeed, it seems to satisfy none of the extreme party beyond old
Joseph Hume, who, for some reason or other to us unknown, has of late
years been in the habit of spreading his ægis from the back seats of the
Treasury bench over the head of the noble Lord, the member for London.
The voice of the ten-pounders, as a body, was not favourable in 1852 to
the lowering of the franchise; and we have heard no counter-clamour from
the class who were and are proposed to be admitted to that privilege. The
Whig aristocracy, naturally enough, regard this bill with peculiar
bitterness. Therefore we do not think that the astonishing change of
opinion, or rather of principle exhibited by Lord John Russell, is to be
traced either to the advice of colleagues, or the influence of more matured
democrats. Our own theory is this—that he never had, as regarded
improvements on the form of the constitution or the representation,
anything like a fixed principle—that he was striking just as much at
random in 1852 as in 1854; and that, so far from having any settled or
original ideas of his own, he grasps at any which may be presented to him
with extreme recklessness and avidity.
We are quite aware that it would be, to say the least of it, gross
impertinence to make any such statement, or to express any such opinion,
without reasonable and rational grounds. We should be very sorry to do so
at any time, but more especially at the present, when we wish to see
Ministers disembarrassed of all perplexing questions at home. But it is
their fault, not ours, if we are forced to make the disclosure; and to show
that, in reality, the grand mechanist of 1832 had so forgotten his craft, if
he ever had a due knowledge of it, that after his last abortive effort, in
1852, he was fain to derive new notions from the pages of the Edinburgh
Review. In saying this, we intend anything but an insinuation against the
talents of the author of the articles to which we refer. We can admire the
ingenuity of his arguments, even while we question their soundness. We
have no right to be curious as to what section of politicians he belongs. He
may represent the philosophic Liberals, or he may be the champion of
Manchester in disguise. All we know is, that he has written three plausible
articles, after the manner of Ignatius Loyola, the result of which has been
that poor Lord John Russell has plunged into the marsh, misled by the
ignis fatuus, and is at the present moment very deep in a quagmire.
Some of our readers will doubtless remember that, during the autumn
of 1851, various pompous paragraphs appeared in the Whig newspapers,
announcing that Lord John Russell had withdrawn himself to country
retirement, for the purpose of maturing a grand and comprehensive
scheme of Parliamentary Reform. The task was entirely gratuitous and
self-imposed; for although the venerable Joseph Hume, Sir Joshua
Walmsley, and a few other Saint Bernards of the like calibre, had
attempted to preach up an itinerant crusade, their efforts met with no
response, and their harangues excited no enthusiasm. Nobody wanted a
new Reform Bill. The class which, of all others, was most opposed to
innovation, embraced the bulk of the shopkeepers in towns, who, having
attained considerable political and municipal influence, were very
unwilling to share it with others, and regarded the lowering of the
franchise not only with a jealous but with an absolutely hostile eye. It was
upon the shoulders of that class that the Whigs had been carried into
power; and it really seemed but a paltry return for their support and
devotion, that a Prime Minister, upon whom they had lavished all their
honours, should attempt to swamp their influence without any adequate
reason. It would be absurd or unfair to charge them with selfishness. The
first Reform Bill, acceded to and hailed by the great mass of the people,
had established a certain property qualification for voters; and no one
could allege that popular opinion was not sufficiently represented in the
House of Commons. Nay, many of the Whigs began to think that popular
opinion was too exclusively represented therein, and did not scruple to say
so. Anyhow, the Bill had so worked that there, in 1851, was Lord John
Russell, its parent and promoter, in the office of Premier of Great Britain,
and in the command of a parliamentary majority. Small marvel if the ten-
pounders asked themselves the question, what, in the name of gluttony,
he could covet more?
They were quite entitled to ask that question, not only of themselves,
but of the singular statesman whom they had been content to follow.
Could he state that there was any measure, not revolutionary, but such as
they and other well-disposed subjects of the realm desired, which he was
prevented from introducing by the aristocratic character of the House of
Commons? Certainly not. The triumph of the Free-trade policy was a
distinct proof to the contrary. Was there any discontent in the country at
the present distribution of the franchise? Nothing of the kind. The apathy
was so great that even those entitled to enrolment would hardly prefer
their claims. Even the enrolled cared little about voting—so little, indeed,
that it was sometimes difficult to persuade one-half of a large constituency
to come to the poll. All attempts at public meetings, for the purpose of
agitating a reduction of the franchise, had been failures. The people were
quite contented with things as they stood, and grumbled at the idea of a
change. And yet this was the time, selected by a Prime Minister who had
everything his own way, for getting up a fresh agitation!
Every one, beyond himself, saw the exceeding absurdity of his conduct.
The leading Whigs became positively angry; and from that period we may
date his rapid decadence in their estimation. The real nature of his
scheme, consisting of an arbitrary lowering of the franchise, was quite well
known; and as that could not, by any possibility, be carried even through
the House of Commons, his own friends thought it advisable to put the
noble Lord upon another scent.
There appeared, accordingly, in the Edinburgh Review for January
1852, an article on “The Expected Reform Bill,” which took most people by
surprise on account of its apparently moderate, philosophic, and even
Conservative tone. It would be difficult to analyse it—it is difficult, even
after reading it, to draw any distinct conclusion from its propositions and
argument. But this, at all events, was admitted, that “clearly there is no
call for Parliamentary Reform on the part of any large or influential class.
There is no zeal about it, one way or the other. An extension of the
franchise is wished for by some, and thought proper and desirable by
many; but it is not an actual want largely felt, nor is the deprivation of the
franchise a practical grievance, clear enough, tangible enough, generally
recognised enough, to have given rise to a genuine, spontaneous, exclusive
demand for redress. There is a general languor and want of interest on the
subject, manifested nowhere more plainly than in the tone and character
of the meetings got up by the Reform Association for the sake of arousing
public feeling. The nation, as a whole, is undeniably indifferent; the
agitation is clearly artificial.” Then, again, we are told that “Quieta non
movere is, in political matters, as often a maxim of wisdom as of laziness;”
and a great deal more to the same effect, which could not have had a very
exhilarating effect on the mind of Lord John Russell, supposing, as we do,
that he was in total ignorance of the article in question before it was given
to the public. Certainly, on this occasion, he had but a poor backing from
his friends.
The view of the writer in question seemed to be this—that instead of
arbitrarily lowering the franchise on the footing of a property
qualification, it is important to discover some criterion by means of which
persons morally and educationally qualified, who have not the franchise at
present, may be admitted to that privilege. We are not reviewing or
discussing the article—we are simply pointing out the sources from which
Lord John Russell has derived most of his new ideas. Therefore we shall
simply quote one passage from this article.
Source of Lord John Russell’s new idea of the Savings’ Bank Deposit
qualification.—“Our present system is defective and unjust in this—that it
selects two kinds or forms of property only as conferring the franchise. Let
us continue to maintain a property qualification; but let us not insist that
the property, so favourably and honourably distinguished, must be
invested in one special mode. If a man has accumulated by diligence or
frugality £50 or £100, and spends it either in the purchase of a freehold,
or in removing his residence from an £8 to a £10 house, his realised
property confers upon him the distinction of a vote. But if he invests the
same sum, earned by similar qualities, in the savings’ bank, or in railway
shares or debentures, or in the purchase of a deferred annuity—which
would probably be much wiser modes of disposing of it—it carries with it
no such privilege. This seems neither equitable nor wise. It might easily be
rectified, and such rectification would be at once one of the safest,
simplest, justest, and most desirable extensions of the franchise that could
be suggested. Let the production before the registration courts of a
savings’ bank book, showing a credit of £50, of at least six months’
standing, or of a bona fide certificate of shares to the same value in a valid
railway, or of coupons to the same amount, be held to entitle a man to be
inscribed upon the list of voters for that year.”—Edinburgh Review, Jan.
1852, p. 265.
Adhering to our original intention of not discussing the merits of the
different proposals of this and the other articles in the Edinburgh Review,
we shall not comment upon the unblushing impudence of such a project
as this, which would place the representation of the country principally in
the hands of millionaires and railway directors. It is unparalleledly
impudent. But we notice it now simply as the germ of Lord John Russell’s
£50 savings’ bank qualification.
By the time this article appeared, Lord John Russell’s Bill was prepared;
though no one expected that it would be carried. The Whig party were
conscious that the hour of their doom was approaching, but they wished
to bear with them into opposition a weapon which might be available for
future warfare. Lord John’s ideas had not then penetrated beyond a
lowering of the franchise and the admission to the register of parties who
paid 40s. a-year of direct taxes. These were his deliberate impressions
before the schoolmaster of the Edinburgh Review appeared abroad.
After this, Lord John Russell went out of office; but the Review kept
harping on Reform. The writer had already stated, “that a new measure of
Parliamentary Reform was demanded, rather in the name of theoretical
propriety than of practical advantage.” It seems to us that such an
admission was nearly tantamount to an argument against the policy of
making any change at all; more especially when we were told, nearly in the
same page, that “there was no call for Parliamentary Reform on the part of
any large or influential class.” If that were true, we should like to know
who “demanded” the new measure? But we must not be too critical
regarding the advances of the new Lycurgus.
In October 1852, a second article appeared, the preamble of which was
very moderate—indeed, rather calculated to impress the casual reader
with the idea that the author would have much preferred if “the vexed
question of the franchise” could have been left alone. Nevertheless it
appeared to him that there were “many reasons which make it impossible
either entirely to shelve or long to postpone the question of Parliamentary
Reform;” and, having stated these, he dashes again into his subject. He is,
however, a great deal too knowing to commence with the proposal of
innovations. He treats us to several pages of high Conservativism,
condemnatory of universal suffrage; and having thus established a kind of
confidence—acting on Quintilian’s advice, to frame the introduction so as
“reddere auditores benevolos, attentos, dociles”—he begins to propound
his new ideas. In this article we have:—
Source of Lord John Russell’s new proposal to swamp the Counties by
the admission of £10 occupants.—“The other plan is to extend the £10
qualification to counties, by which means every householder (to the
requisite value) throughout the land would possess a vote; if he resided in
a small town or a village, or an isolated dwelling, he would be upon the
county register. The only objection we can hear of to this plan is, that in
the country districts and in hamlets a £10 occupancy generally includes
some land, and would not, therefore, indicate the same social station as
the living in a £10 house in town, and that it might lead to the creation, for
the sake of augmenting landlord influence, of a numerous and dependent
class of tenant voters. But in the first place, the occupier of a £10 house in
villages and small towns belongs to a decidedly higher social grade than
the occupier of a £10 house in cities; and, in the second place, it would not
be difficult to meet the objection, by requiring that the qualifying
occupancy shall be, in the county register, a house, and not a house and
land, or by fixing a sum which shall, as nearly as can be ascertained, be
generally an equivalent to the £10 occupancy contemplated by the present
law.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1852, p. 472.
That is the second instance of appropriation on the part of the wise,
ripe, deliberate statesman, who for twenty years had been watching the
progress of his own handiwork with the view to introducing repairs.
Before this article in the Edinburgh Review appeared, it had never
occurred to him how convenient it might be to swamp the counties, and
how very simple were the means of doing so! Now for appropriation third:
—
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal to admit all Graduates of
Universities to Town and County franchise. “It is, of course, desirable,
and is admitted to be so by every party, that all educated men shall be
voters; the difficulty is to name any ostensible qualifications which shall
include them, and them alone. But though we cannot frame a criterion
which shall include all, there is no reason why we should not accept one
which will include a considerable number of whose fitness to possess the
franchise there can be no question. We would propose, therefore, that the
franchise be granted to all graduates of Universities,” &c.—Edinburgh
Review, Oct. 1852, p. 473.
Another hint adopted by Sir Fretful Plagiary! Next we come to a more
serious matter:—
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal for disfranchising the lesser
English boroughs.—“The great majority of them are notoriously
undeserving of the franchise, and those who know them best are least
disposed to undertake their defence. The plan of combining a number of
them into one constituency would be futile or beneficial according to the
details of each individual case. If a close or a rotten borough were
amalgamated with an open or a manufacturing town, much advantage
might possibly result; if two or three corrupt or manageable constituencies
merely united their iniquities, the evil of the existing things would only be
spread farther and rooted faster. We should propose, therefore, at once to
reduce the 61 boroughs with fewer than 500 electors, and now returning
91 members, to one representative each.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1852,
p. 496.
We shall see presently that this proposal was amended, as not being
sufficiently sweeping. Only thirty seats are here proscribed; but it was
afterwards found expedient to increase the black list to the number of
sixty-six. Pass we to the next instance of palpable cribbage.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal that Members accepting office
shall not be obliged to vacate their seats.—“The most desirable man
cannot be appointed Colonial Minister, because his seat, if vacated, might
be irrecoverable. Administrations cannot strengthen themselves by the
alliance of colleagues who possess the confidence of the general public,
because the place for which they sit has been offended by some unpopular
vote or speech. We need add no more on this head: the peculiarity of the
case is, that we have no adverse arguments to meet.”—Edinburgh Review,
Oct. 1852, p. 501.
The writer is decidedly wrong about the non-existence of adverse
arguments; and we shall be happy to convince him of the fact if he will be
kind enough to accord us a meeting. In the mean time, however, he has
humbugged Lord John, which was evidently his special purpose. Even
while we deprecate the morality of his proceeding, we can hardly forbear
expressing our admiration of his skill. We know not his earthly name or
habitation; but he is a clever fellow, for he has led, with equal audacity and
success, the ex-Premier of Great Britain, and the father of Reform, by the
nose!
But we have not yet done. The article last referred to was penned and
published before the new Parliament met, towards the close of 1852, and
before the balance and state of parties could be ascertained. The result of
the election showed that parties were in effect almost equally balanced—so
much so, that, but for the junction of the Peelites with the Liberals, Lord
Derby would have obtained a majority. The election, it will be
remembered, took place under circumstances peculiarly unfavourable to
the Government; and never perhaps was misrepresentation of every kind
more unscrupulously employed than by the Liberal press on that occasion.
Still it became evident that Conservatism was gaining ground in the
country; and it was a natural inference that, after the question of
Protection was finally set at rest, its progress would be still more rapid.
This was not exactly what the writer in the Edinburgh Review had
calculated on. He now saw that it would be necessary, if the Liberal party
was to be maintained in power, to go a good deal further than he at first
proposed; and accordingly, when he appears again before us in October
1853, we find him armed this time, not with a pruning-hook, but with a
formidable axe. We hear no more about “theoretical propriety”—he is
evidently determined upon mischief. Now, then, for his developed views,
as adopted by his docile pupil.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal that freemen shall have no
votes.—“There is no doubt in the mind of any man, we imagine, that
incomparably the most openly and universally venal portion of borough
constituencies are the old freemen, so unhappily and weakly retained by
the Reform Act of 1832.... The disfranchisement of the freemen is,
perhaps, of all steps which will be urged upon Parliament, the most clearly
and indisputably right and necessary, and, added to the plan already
suggested for pursuing individual cases of venality, will probably sweep
away the most incurably corrupt class of electors.”—Edinburgh Review,
Oct. 1853, p. 596.
 We have already seen that, in Oct. 1852, the reviewer proposed to
abstract thirty members from the smaller English boroughs. It became
evident, however, that so paltry a massacre of the innocents would not
suffice, more especially as it had become part of the scheme to swamp the
English counties. Accordingly we are told, in an off-hand and easy
manner: “To all that we said on a former occasion as to the theoretical
propriety and justice of the small borough representation, we
unreservedly adhere. But, unfortunately, it is too notorious that these
boroughs are generally in a condition which, for the sake of electoral
purity, imperatively demands their disfranchisement, partial or entire.
Here again it is true that parliamentary statistics do not altogether bear
out our conclusion. Of the seventy-two boroughs convicted of bribery
between 1833 and 1853, only twenty-one can properly be called small—as
having fewer than five hundred electors—while some of the more
constantly and flagrantly impure places number their votes by thousands.”
So, according to the admission of even this writer, there is no case
established, on the ground of corruption, for the wholesale
disfranchisement of the small boroughs. Nevertheless we are to assume
them to be impure, because he says it is notorious that they are so; and by
this short and summary process of assertion he gets rid of the trouble of
investigation. The boroughs are not put upon their trial, for there is no
specific charge against them; but they are condemned at once because the
writer has a low opinion of their morality. This is worse than Jeddart
justice, where the trial took place after the execution. In the case of the
boroughs there is to be no trial at all. The following conclusion is therefore
easily arrived at: “There can be no doubt in the mind of any reformer that,
in some way or other, these small boroughs ought to be suppressed; that
we must have, if possible, no more constituencies under one thousand
electors.” So much for the disfranchisement; now for the redistribution.
Final scheme suggested to Lord John Russell for disfranchising the
small boroughs and swamping the counties.—“The third method
proposed is to merge all these small boroughs into the county
constituencies, by depriving them of their members, and reducing the
county franchise to a £10 occupancy. In this way the class would still be
represented, and the individuals would still retain their votes, and the
electoral lists of counties would be considerably modified and greatly
enriched. This plan would, we think, be far the fairest and most desirable,
inasmuch as it would give us constituencies large in number and varied in
character, and, therefore, to a great extent secure against illicit and undue
influences.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1853, p. 602.
 The next and last point which we shall notice is the representation of
minorities. We do not know to whom the credit of having invented this
notable scheme is really due. There are various claimants in the field. Mr
G. L. Craik, of Queen’s College, Belfast, asserts that he was the original
discoverer, having propounded a plan of this nature so early as 1836.
Ingenious as the idea may be, it will hardly rank in importance with the
discovery of the steam-engine, nor do we think that its originator is
entitled to any exorbitant share of public gratitude or applause. We shall
give it as we find it in the Review.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal to give members in certain
cases to minorities.—“The mode by which we propose to insure the
constituent minorities their fair share in the representation—i. e. to make
the majorities and minorities in the House of Commons correspond as
nearly as may be to majorities and minorities in the country, or in the
electoral bodies—is, to give (as now) to each elector as many votes as there
are members to be chosen, and to allow him to divide these votes as he
pleases among the candidates, or to give them all to one. But as at present
most places return two members, it is obvious that, under the proposed
arrangement, wherever the minority exceeded one-third of the total
number of the electors, they would be able to return one member, or to
obtain one-half the representation, which would be more than their fair
share, and would place them on an equality with the majority, which
would never do; while, if they fell short of one-third, they would be, as
now, virtually unrepresented and ignored. To obviate this, it will be
necessary so to arrange our electoral divisions, that as many
constituencies as possible should return three members: one of these a
minority, if at all respectable, could always manage to secure.”—Edin.
Review, Oct. 1853, p. 622.
Here, at all events, is the notion about the representation of majorities,
and the establishment of as many constituencies as possible, returning
three members. Lord John Russell’s method of working this, is to restrict
each elector to two votes.
Thus we see that all the leading features and peculiarities of Lord John
Russell’s new Reform Bill—the disfranchisement of the boroughs, the
swamping of the counties, the ten-pound occupancy clause, the
qualification by deposit in the savings’ bank, the voting of graduates, the
retention of their seats by members accepting office, and the
representation of minorities—are contained in the articles published in
the Edinburgh Review, in 1852 and 1853. This is, to say the least of it, a
very singular coincidence. Of course we do not mean to maintain that
Lord John Russell was debarred from availing himself of any useful hints
which might be offered him, or from adopting the notions of any political
sage, or harum-scarum cobbler of constitutions; we entirely admit his
right to gather wisdom, or its counterfeit, from any source whatever. What
we wish to impress upon the public is this, that, down to 1852, not one of
these notions had occurred to our grand constitutional reformer, who for
twenty years had been sedulously watching the operation of his original
measure! Nay, more than that: two years ago, his ideas on the subject of
Parliamentary Reform were diametrically opposite to those which he has
now promulgated; and that not only in detail, but in absolute essence and
form! Had he come before us this year with a scheme based upon the
principle of 1852, which was a lowering of the franchise, without any
farther disturbance of the constitution of the electoral bodies, it would
have been but a poor criticism to have taunted him with a minor change in
the details. He might have used his discretion in elevating or lowering the
point where the franchise was to begin, without subjecting himself to any
sneer on account of change of principle. But, wonderful as are the changes
which we have seen of late years in the views of public men, this is the
most astounding of them all. Never before, perhaps, did a statesman pass
such a decided censure on his own judgment, or make such an admission
of former recklessness and error. If he is right now, he must have been
utterly wrong before. The constitution of 1852, as he would have made it,
must have been a bad one. One-tenth of the members of the House of
Commons would still have been returned by constituencies which he now
regards as unfit to be constituencies any more. If the maintenance of the
small boroughs is a blot on the constitution, how was it that Lord John
Russell did not discover that blot until 1853, after the articles we have
referred to were published? Did he take his ideas from those articles? If
so, was there ever a more humiliating confession of entire poverty of
mind? If he did not take his ideas from those articles, what was it that
produced so entire a change of opinion?—what eminent political oculist
has removed the film which impeded his vision but two short years ago?
This is, in reality, a very grave matter. We are accustomed in this country
to associate measures with men, and sometimes to accept the former on
account of our belief and confidence in the sagacity of those who propose
them. But what faith can we repose in a man who thus plays fast and loose
upon a question with which he has been occupied all his life? This is not a
case of expediency arising out of unforeseen circumstances. That the
question is of the deepest import no one in his senses can deny. We know
how the constitution, as framed at present, works; but we do not know
how it may work if very materially altered. And yet we find the same
mechanist proposing, within two years, two separate kinds of alteration!
The first was simple enough, and had at least this much in its favour, that
it did not require any violent displacement of the machinery. The second
is so complex that the whole machinery must be re-arranged. It was our
sincere hope that the country had seen the last of sudden conversions of
parties—at no time edifying events, and sometimes attended by disastrous
consequences—but we must, it seems, prepare ourselves for another
conversion on the part of the Whigs, if this bill is to be carried through.
They must, supposing them inclined to support Lord John Russell, either
unsay what they said, or were prepared to have said, in 1852, or be ready
to maintain that they were then greatly in advance of their leader. The
dilemma, we admit, is an unpleasant and an odious one; but there is no
escape from it, if the Whigs are determined, at all hazards, to follow their
erratic leader.
That there is room for certain changes in the national representation we
are by no means disposed to deny. It is impossible to devise any system so
perfect as to preclude the idea of amendment; indeed, we suppose that
there never was a constitution, or phase of a constitution, in the world,
which gave entire and perfect satisfaction to all who lived under its
operation. We may be told that the present system is theoretically wrong,
that its principle is to exalt property and to exclude intelligence, and that
in some parts it is incongruous, inconsistent, and contradictory. Possibly
there may be some truth in such allegations; but then we must never lose
sight of this, that the real test of a constitution is its practical working. It is
undeniable that under the present system the middle classes have gained,
not only power, but preponderance in the state; and accordingly we find
that they are not favourable to a change which would certainly operate to
their disadvantage. The ulterior aims of the men of Manchester may
prompt them to desire a still further infusion of the democratic element,
but neither the members nor the doctrines of that school have found
favour with the British public. If public opinion generally, and the great
interests of the nation, are well and effectively represented in the House of
Commons, it does seem to us a very perilous experiment to disturb that
state of matters. We should like very much to hear from Lord John Russell
a distinct exposition of the results which he anticipates, should this
scheme of his be carried. Is there any real point of interest to the nation
which he is at present debarred from bringing forward by the exclusive
constitution of the House of Commons? What are the existing grievances
which call for so radical an alteration?
“What is there now amiss
That Cæsar and his senate must redress?”
 We apprehend that the noble lord would be greatly puzzled to frame an
intelligible answer to such queries. Well then, we are, perforce, compelled
to fall back upon theory, and to assume that he vindicates his proposal,
not because future measures will be of a better kind, or better discussed
than heretofore, but because it is desirable, for symmetry’s sake, that the
representation should be readjusted.
Be it so. We are content to take that view, albeit a low one, and to
examine his scheme without any partial leaning to the present
constitution of the House of Commons. And first, let us see what regard he
has paid to the principle of equal representation.
It will not, we presume, be denied by any one that the three kingdoms of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, ought to be put upon an equitable footing
as regards one another in this matter of representation. If imperial
measures were all that the House of Commons had to discuss, this relative
equality might be of less importance; but with separate laws and separate
institutions guaranteed to and existing in the three kingdoms, it is proper
that each should be fairly represented in the grand council of the nation.
At present that is not the case. If we take the test of population, Scotland
ought to have 18 more members than are now allotted to her; if we take
the test of taxation and revenue, she ought to have 25 more. Combining
the two, there is a deficit of more than 20 members to Scotland in her
share of the national representation. Now, that is a matter which ought, in
the very first instance, to have occupied the attention of the noble lord,
and would have so occupied it, had he laid down for himself any fixed
principles of action. It is nonsense to talk of inequalities between one
borough and another, or between town and country qualification, before
the first grand inequality is remedied. Apply the double test of population
and revenue, and you will find that Ireland is upon an equality in point of
representation with England, but that Scotland is not; and no reason has
been, or can be, assigned for this anomaly. The quota for Scotland was
fixed by the Act of Union at 45 members. It was increased by the Reform
Act of 1832 to 53, but the number is still insufficient. Lord John Russell
proposes, out of the 66 disfranchised seats, to give three to Scotland, but
he has assigned no reason for doing so. The people of Scotland are not in
the position of men supplicating for a boon. They are demanding that,
when such a change as this is made, their political rights shall be
respected and allowed; and they will not be satisfied with less than a
measure of perfect justice. We think it right to put forward this point
prominently, because it lies at the foundation of the whole question of the
readjustment of the representation.
 The question of the disfranchisement of the boroughs is one which
should be approached with very great caution. In 1852, as we have already
seen, Lord John Russell did not propose to touch them—now he has made
up his mind to lop away 66 members from this branch of the
representation. This is, in our opinion, by far too reckless a proceeding.
We can see no good ground or principle for the entire disfranchisement of
any of the boroughs, a step which we think ought never to be taken, except
in case of absolute and proved corruption. When constituencies are too
small, the proper and natural plan is, to annex and unite, not to abolish;
and we believe that this could be effected with very little difficulty. The
new Schedule A contains a list of 19 boroughs, returning at present 29
members, which are to be wholly disfranchised, on the ground either that
the number of the electors is under 300, or that of the inhabitants under
5000. Therefore the privilege is to be taken from them, and the voters are
to be thrown into the counties. We agree with Lord John Russell, that
some constituencies are too small, but we do not agree with him in his
scheme of disfranchisement, and we utterly object to his proposal of
quartering the electors on the counties. They are borough voters, and so
they ought to remain; and it is a very poor pretext, indeed, to make this
disfranchisement the excuse for altering the county qualification. Let a
union of the boroughs, by all means, take place; let the number of their
members, if necessary, be considerably reduced; but let us have no
disfranchisement, or assimilation between the town and county
qualification, which would quite upset the whole system throughout the
kingdom.
We do not profess to be conversant with local details, so that we cannot
speak with perfect confidence; but it appears to us that some such
arrangement as the following, which would unite the smaller boroughs,
and at the same time diminish the number of members, might be adopted
with advantage:—
 Present Combined Present Future
County. Borough.
Electors. Electors. Members. Members.
Devonshire, Ashburton, 211 1
520 1
„ Dartmouth, 309 1
„ Honiton, 335 2
649 1
„ Totness, 314 2
Dorsetshire, Lyme Regis, 297 1
665 1
Somersetshire, Wells, 368 2
Sussex, Arundel, 208 1
493 1
„ Midhurst, 285 1
Wiltshire, Calne, 151 1
1
„ Marlborough, 254 641 2
„ Wilton, 236 1
Yorkshire, Richmond, 342 2 1
642
„ Northallerton, 303 1
Essex, Harwich, 299 2
506 1
Norfolk, Thetford, 217 2

22 7
Thus, without any disfranchisement, or violent displacement, fifteen
boroughs, at present returning twenty-two members, might be formed
into seven respectable constituencies, returning one member each to
Parliament. There are, however, four others—Knaresborough, Evesham,
Reigate, and Andover—which cannot be so easily thrown together. We
would proceed with these on the same principle, by adding them to
boroughs at present returning two members, but which Lord John Russell
proposes to restrict to one member each. The following is our view:—
Present Combined Present Future
County. Borough.
Electors. Electors. Members. Members.
Yorkshire, Knaresborough, 226 2
583 1
„ Ripon, 357 2
Worcester, Evesham, 396 2
755 2
„ Tewkesbury, 359 2
Surrey, Reigate, 297 1
„ Guildford, 595 1124 2 2
Hampshire, Andover, 232 2

13 5
Here there are twenty-three seats set at liberty, without disfranchisement
in any one instance. In justice to ourselves, we must state that we have
implicitly followed the schedule attached to Lord John Russell’s bill, and
not indulged in speculations of our own. Had the latter been the case, we
might have been tempted to ask why Westbury, with an electorate of 289,
is to be spared, while Wells, with 368, is to be blotted from the list of
boroughs?
Besides these, Lord John Russell proposes that thirty other seats shall
be made vacant, by restricting boroughs now returning two members to
one. (His number is thirty-three, but we have already noticed Ripon,
Tewkesbury, and Guildford.) If it could be shown that there is a really
clamant case for representation elsewhere, the reduction might be
allowed, but only to the extent required. It seems to us perfect madness to
proceed with wholesale disfranchisement, until the necessity of
transferring seats to other places is satisfactorily established. We can very
well understand why some of the smaller boroughs which have now two
members should be restricted to one, in order to satisfy the just
requirements of some rising township which has hitherto been
unrepresented. We have no doubt that Lord John Russell is quite right in
his proposals to give members to Birkenhead, Burnley, and Staleybridge,
and to erect Chelsea and Kensington into a Parliamentary borough to
return two members. We think that two additional members each might
be granted to the West Riding of Yorkshire and to the county of Lancaster
—that Salford should return two members instead of one—and that the
London University should be represented. We think that these are rational
demands, and such as might be accorded; and the necessary number for
these purposes, and for putting Scotland on a fair footing of equality with
England and Ireland, would amount to the vacation of about thirty or
thirty-two existing seats. We have already shown how, without entirely
disfranchising any borough, twenty-three seats may be obtained; and if
nine others are required, it would be no hardship to take from each of the
following boroughs one out of the two members which they presently
return:—

County. Borough. Constituency.

Hampshire, Lymington, 328
Cumberland, Cockermouth, 330
Buckinghamshire, Marlow (Great), 335
Wiltshire, Chippenham, 345
Buckinghamshire, Buckingham, 349
Devonshire, Tavistock, 352
Cornwall, Bodmin, 360
Wiltshire, Devizes, 363
Buckinghamshire, Wycombe (Chipping), 365
This would take out of Schedule B no less than twenty-one seats which are
now included in it; and it would be obviously unwise to exhaust, all at
once, the only source from which new rising constituencies can be
endowed. Lord John Russell seems to think—and we agree with him—that
the present number of the House of Commons (654) is quite large enough;
and although there is no principle to fix numbers, it may be as well to
maintain them as they are. It is but natural to expect that, in future years,
some places will decrease, and others increase, and that partial changes
will be required. For that very reason we deprecate too hasty a reduction
of the boroughs, and an apportionment of their seats to places and
constituencies which do not require them. Suppose that in ten years after
this, new seats of commerce and manufacture, like Birkenhead, Burnley,
and Staleybridge, start into existence—that places like Salford increase
immensely—and that new Chelseas require to be conjoined with new
Kensingtons—where are we to find members for them, without unduly
swelling the bulk of the House of Commons, if all the smaller borough
seats are to be disposed of at the present time? The Legislature may say
just now, with perfect propriety, to the men of Lymington—“Your borough
is the smallest in the country which returns two members to Parliament.
Birkenhead is a place of such importance that it requires a member; and
therefore, as it is not expedient to increase the aggregate number of the
national representatives, we shall take a member from you, and give one
to Birkenhead.” That is quite intelligible; but why disfranchise boroughs
when you do not know what to do with the vacancies? It is true that Lord
John Russell tells us what he means to do with them; but we entirely
demur to every proposal of his beyond those which we have already
noticed. He proposes, we observe, to give three members instead of two to
the following cities and boroughs whose constituencies we have noted:—

Towns. Constituencies.
Birmingham, 8,780
Bristol, 10,958
Bradford, 2,723
Leeds, 6,400
Liverpool, 15,382
Manchester, 17,826
Sheffield, 5,612
Wolverhampton, 3,499

It must strike every one that there can be no principle in this. The
constituencies both of Manchester and Liverpool are more than five times