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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2
Literary Texts and Collections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And redning Phoebus lifts his golden Fire:
The Birds in vain their amorous Descant joyn;
Or chearful Fields resume their green Attire:
These Ears, alas! For other Notes repine,
A different Object do these Eyes require. (284)
The “Ode to Adversity,” later published as a “hymn,” is also dated 1742 and written
out in the old style in Gray’s small and meticulous hand (284–85). Also dated
1742 is the poem now generally known as the Eton College ode, although it is
recorded here as “Ode on a distant Prospect of Windsor, & the adjacent Country”
(278–79, 284). It also appears in the old style: “Ye distant Spires, ye antique
Towers.” “Noon-Tide, An Ode,” which we know as the “Ode to Spring,” follows the
same pattern—“Still is the toiling Hand of Care” (275, 278)—as does “A Long
Story,” dated 1750 and entered much later in the book (651–52). “On the Death of
Selina, a favourite Cat, who fell into a China-Tub with gold-fishes in it, & was
Another random document with
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census of 10,000 individuals. Six districts were chosen in different
sections of the city, representing six different economic and social
groups. Great care was exercised in selecting the districts, so that the
population in each might be as homogeneous as possible regarding
economic and sanitary status, as well as race, and living conditions in
general.
We have sought to clarify and to abbreviate our description of the
characteristics of the various districts by incorporating a map,
together with photographs of typical streets in each district. One who
compares these streets as they are seen in the photographs would
scarcely find it necessary to enter the buildings in order to discover
the living conditions of the occupants (Chart XIII).
CHART XIII.
Map of greater Boston showing the

distribution of the districts covered by
the author’s house census.
District I includes an Italian population of 2,000 individuals, one-

half of which live in the most congested portion of the city (see
photograph) known as the North End, while the other half, living in
East Boston, are slightly less crowded.
District II, in South Boston, consists of 2,000 individuals almost
entirely of Irish race stock.
Fig. 1.—District 1. Italian tenements. Very congested and very
poor.
District III, like District I, consists of three groups living in very

similar environment to the two groups of the first district, but
composed chiefly of Jewish race stock of various nationalities. The
photograph for this district represents the area in the “West Side”
near the Charles River Basin. The area in the “South End” is of
similar type, while the area in East Boston is housed similarly to the
Italian district in East Boston. The dwellings in both of these latter
districts correspond to those shown in the second photograph of
District II.
While the first three districts comprise tenement areas, some poor
and the remainder very poor, Districts IV and V represent the middle
class, and consist nearly entirely of “Duplex” and “Three-Decker”
buildings. The first of these comprises 1,000 individuals of mixed
race and nationality, the type broadly spoken of as American. The
second consists of a Jewish population of 1,600.
Fig. 2.—District 2. Irish tenements. Congested and poor.
Fig. 3.—Another street in the Irish tenement district.

Fig. 4.—District 3. Jewish tenements. Very congested. Very poor.
Fig. 5.—District 4. Middle class. Mixed American population.

Fig. 6.—District 5. Middle class. Jewish population. Moderately
well-to-do.
Fig. 7.—District 6. Well-to-do population. Mixed American.

In District VI are included 1,400 individuals belonging to the well-
to-do and moderately wealthy families of Brookline.
The six districts may be considered as representative of the various
strata of society, so that we are enabled to study the influenza and its
mode of action under varying environment. We have selected areas
in the city consisting of households or homes rather than boarding
houses and rooming populations. After a few attempts in the latter
group we became convinced that the information obtained in
rooming houses was utterly valueless. In the Jewish districts we were
able, through the kind co-operation of the Federated Jewish
Charities, to use trained Jewish Social Service Workers, each of
whom had previously worked in the district assigned to her, thereby
possessing the confidence of the inhabitants. They were also able to
speak the language. One-half of the Italian district was surveyed by
an Italian physician and the other half by an American Social Service
Worker who knew the Italian language.
The information obtained was recorded on printed forms, which
were filled out in accordance with detailed written instructions.
Form “A” contained the necessary information concerning the family
as a whole, including statistical data of each individual, description
of the dwelling, of the sanitary condition, of the economic status, etc.
Form “B” was filled out for each individual and gave detailed
information as to the occupation and illnesses during the 1918–19 or
the 1920 influenza epidemics, or during the interval. Form “B” was
so arranged that the inspector was not called upon to make the
diagnosis of influenza, but to record the various symptoms as
described by the patient. The decision as to the diagnosis was made
later, by the author. All blank spaces were filled in with either a
positive or negative answer, so that the reviewer knew that all
questions had been asked and answered. (See Appendix.)
The inspection was begun on February 9th, at the height of the
epidemic. All records were turned in and reviewed by the author,
who blue-penciled obvious inaccuracies and incorporated directions
and questions in those instances where he desired further
information. The records were then returned to the inspectors who,
at the termination of the epidemic early in March, surveyed the
entire 10,000 a second time, checking up their first record,
correcting any inaccuracies, and adding records of additional cases of
influenza which had occurred in the interval.
The most careful statistical surveys and compilations are not
without error. We have gone into considerable detail in the preceding
description in order to demonstrate the several checks that have
been made upon the work, without which information others would
be unable to judge of the accuracy or value of our work.
Diagnostic standards for the 1918 epidemic.—All cases of illness
recorded on the reports, which have occurred during either the 1918
or the 1920 epidemics, or in the interval between them, have been
put into four groups as regards diagnosis of influenza. Cases are
designated as “Yes,” “Probable,” “Doubtful,” and “No.”
Cases of illness occurring during the months of 1918 and 1919 in
which influenza was epidemic and in which the patient remembers
that he had the more definite symptoms, (fever, headache, backache,
pain in the extremities, pneumonia) and in which he was sick at least
three days and in bed at least one day, have been designated as “Yes.”
The symptoms chosen are those most likely to be remembered. The
individual frequently does not remember all. Statements of the
absence of fever are often unreliable. Usually the headache, backache
or pain in the extremities, or even all of these are well recollected.
Cases occurring particularly during the epidemic period in which
the more definite symptoms are unknown, but who were sick three
days or longer and who were in bed at least one day, were probably
influenza. This is particularly true if there were no other symptoms
suggestive of some other definite disease. Such cases were designated
“Probable.”
Cases have been designated as doubtful when the evidence of
illness falls short of the above desiderata. Cases of true influenza may
fall into this group, either because of the extreme mildness of the
symptoms and course or because of the inaccurate memory of the
individual concerning the events of his illness sixteen months
previously. Our results show that the group of doubtful cases is
relatively very small and the number of true cases lost in this group
will be negligible.
One important reason for adhering to the above classification is
that it corresponds closely with that used by Frost and Sydenstricker,
so that our results may easily be compared with theirs.
Standards for 1920.—For 1920 the illnesses were so recent in the
minds of the patients that we have required rather full information
for making the diagnosis of “Yes.” For this designation certain
symptoms are arbitrarily required. Certain additional symptoms, if
present, serve to strengthen the diagnosis of influenza. The required
symptoms are fever, confinement to bed for one day or more and at
least two out of the following three, headache, backache and pain in
the extremities. The additional symptoms which influence the
classification are sudden onset, prostration, lachrymation, epistaxis,
and cough.
Cases designated as probable are those in which the symptoms as
enumerated above are incomplete in one or more details, but yet in
which the diagnosis of influenza would be justified. “Probable,”
therefore, means that the case is to be accepted among the list of true
influenza cases. This is particularly so when the case occurs during
the epidemic period.
“Doubtful” applies to those cases in which the evidence although
suggestive of influenza, is not complete enough to warrant such a
diagnosis. The doubtful feature may be in the lack of too great a
number of the symptoms enumerated, or the presence of symptoms
which might be due to some other disease. Certain cases occurring at
the same time with other cases of typical influenza in the same
household, and which would otherwise have been recorded as
doubtful, have been marked either “Probable” or “Yes.”
Standards of severity.—A purely arbitrary classification of severity
has been adopted. Probably no two observers would agree exactly on
a classification of this nature, but for the purposes of this study the
following will suit all requirements provided the standard used is
carried in mind throughout the comparison.
If a patient with influenza is under medical care, and the case is
one of ordinary severity, the usual period in which the individual is
advised to remain in bed is one week. This is the basis of the criteria
of severity.
Mild.—A case is recorded as mild if the individual has remained in
bed three days or less; Average, if in bed four to seven days; Severe,
if in bed over seven days. Pneumonia. This designation is added to
that of “severe” only in case the physician made such a diagnosis, or
if the evidence under “symptomatology” leaves no doubt as to the
condition.
Examples of individual exceptions to the preceding general
classification are as follows: An individual in bed two days, but sick
for three weeks might be recorded as average. A mother, with a
family of sick children and who spent no time in bed may have been
a severe case of influenza. In fact, we have allowed ourselves a
certain latitude in individual cases in classifying both the diagnosis
and the severity of the disease.
In the final tabulation we have included both the “Yes” and the
“Probable” as being cases of influenza. This has been done after a
careful comparison of both groups.
As a check upon the reliability of the work we have compared our
results for the 1918 epidemic with those reported by Frost and
Sydenstricker and have discovered that with regard to the general
subject discussed in both studies there is close agreement. This is
important in view of the long period that has elapsed between the
first pandemic and the time of our survey, and because we are unable
to compare our tables of incidence for 1918 with those for the city or
the state at large. Our own records do not place the date of
occurrence of the disease in 1918 any more closely than by month.
We have compared our 1920 incidence curves with those of
Massachusetts and find a close correspondence, particularly in the
date of onset, peak, and disappearance of the epidemic. We have
done likewise for the occurrence of the disease in the city of Boston
at large (Chart XIV).
In the past but few house-to-house canvasses have been made with
relation to influenza. Auerbach, following the 1889 epidemic,
collected statistics on 200 families distributed throughout the city of
Cologne. Abbott, while not conducting a canvass, did obtain a certain
amount of valuable information by letters addressed to physicians,
institutions and corporations throughout the State of Massachusetts.
There is fairly abundant literature on the disease as it occurred in
institutions. Moody and Capps, in a study of the epidemic in Chicago
in December, 1915 and January, 1916, made a survey of the
personnel and inmates of four institutions in that city. Among other
rather numerous statistical compilations from institutions we may
mention that of Hamilton and Leonard which was devoted
particularly to a study of immunity, and that of Stanley at San
Quentin Prison, California.
Garvie has reported his personal experience with influenza in an
industrial area and discusses the disease as it has occurred in
families in his private practice.
Carnwath reports a “block census” undertaken by Dr. Niven in
Manchester, England. This is of the same nature as our own work.
Reeks has made a detailed house survey of 2,757 persons in New
Britain, Connecticut. D. W. Baker has conducted somewhat similar
surveys for the New York Department of Health, and Winslow and
Rogers quote the excellent record of the Visiting Nurse Association of
New Haven, in which they have information for all of the families
cared for by the nurses. This, however, is a collected group and does
not correspond with the so-called block census.
CHART XIV.
Chart showing the actual incidence of
influenza in Boston by weeks and the
actual incidence among the 10,000
individuals surveyed by weeks during the
first three months of 1920.
Full Line—incidence in the entire city

based upon reports to the Health
Commissioner.
Dotted Line—incidence in the six

districts surveyed.
The most comprehensive and detailed work that has been done in
this line is that reported by Frost and Sydenstricker and by Frost, the
first being the result of a canvass of 46,535 persons in Maryland, and
the second a similar report based on a canvass of 130,033 persons in
several different cities of the United States. We shall have occasion to
refer to these later.
Morbidity.
There has been great actual variation in the morbidity from
influenza in the various epidemics and even in different localities
during single epidemics. Previous to 1889 there were no reliable
statistics for the disease incidence, and subsequent to that date the
records, for the reasons previously mentioned, have still been not
entirely adequate.
In the history of influenza morbidity, as in that of its mortality, we
must content ourselves for information prior to the nineteenth
century with the very general estimates made by contemporary
historians. During the last century the statistics have been more
numerous and more nearly correct. As far back as the first
recognized pandemic, 1510, the extremely high morbidity has been a
recognized characteristic. Thomas Short in speaking of this
pandemic says, “The disease ... attacked at once and raged all over
Europe, not missing a family and scarce a person.”
Pasquier in 1557 spoke of the disease as common to all individuals,
and Valleriola describes the widespread distribution of the epidemic
throughout the whole of France during that year. It spared neither
sex, age, nor rank, neither children nor aged, rich nor poor. The
mortality, however, was low, “children only, dying.” Again, Thomas
Short remarks, “This disease seized most countries very suddenly
when it entered, catching thousands the same moment.”
Of the second pandemic, 1580, Short says, “Though all had it, few
died in these countries except such as were let blood of, or had
unsound viscera.”
Thomas Sydenham remarks that in the epidemic of 1675 no one
escaped, whatever might be his age or temperament, and the disease
ran throughout whole families at once.
Molineux recorded concerning 1693, “All conditions of persons
were attacked, those residing in the country as well as those in the
city; those who lived in the fresh air and those who kept to their
rooms; those who were very strong and hardy were taken in the same
manner as the weak and spoiled; men, women and children, persons
of all ranks and stations in life, the youngest as well as the oldest.”
Schrock tells us that in Augsburg in 1712 not a house was spared by
the disease. According to Waldschmidt in Kiel, ten and more persons
were frequently taken ill in one house, and Slevogt says that the
disease was fearful because so many persons contracted it at the
same time. The disease was, however, not dangerous, for Slevogt
continues: “Fear soon vanished when it was seen that although it had
spread all over the city, it left the sick with equal rapidity.”
It is estimated that in the epidemic of 1729–1730, 60,000 people
developed the disease in Rome, 50,000 in Mayence, and 14,000 in
Turin. In London “barely one per cent. escaped.” In Lausanne one-
half of the population, then estimated at 4,000, was stricken. In
Vienna over 60,000 persons were affected. In the monasteries of
Paris so many of the inmates were suffering from the disease that no
services could be held.
Huxham is quoted in Thomson’s “Annals” as declaring concerning
the epidemic of 1732–33: “Not a house was free from it, the beggar’s
hut and the nobleman’s palace were alike subject to its attack, scarce
a person escaping either in town or country; old and young, strong
and infirm, shared the same fate.”
Finkler writes as follows concerning the epidemic of 1758: “On
Oct. 24th, Whytt continues, the pestilence began to abate. He is not
sure whether this was due to a change in the weather, or because the
disease had already attacked most people, although the latter seems
more plausible to him, particularly as he says that ‘in Edinburgh and
its vicinity not one out of six or seven escaped,’ and in other localities
it is said to have been even worse. In the north of Scotland also, the
epidemic was greatly disseminated from the middle of October to the
end of November. A young physician wrote to Robert Whytt: ‘It was
the most universal epidemic I ever saw, and I am persuaded that
more people were seized with it than escaped.’ This same physician
reported that ‘it was not at all mortal here.’”
In the epidemic of 1762, we learn from Razoux, de Brest, Saillant,
Ehrmann, that the morbidity was great while the mortality was low.
According to Grimm, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of Eisenach
contracted the disease in 1767.
Daniel Rainy, of Dublin, in describing the invasion of an
institution in 1775–76, tells us that from among 367 persons varying
in age from 12 to 90 years, 200 were taken sick. Thomas Glass says:
“There sickened in Exeter Hospital all the inmates, one hundred and
seventy-three in number; one hundred and sixty-two had coughs.
Two or three days after the hospital was invaded the city workhouse
was attacked; of the two hundred paupers housed there only very few
escaped the disease.”
Gilibert described an extraordinary morbidity in Russia in 1780–
81.
Metzger says that in 1782 the Russian catarrh was so universal
during the month of March that in many houses all the inhabitants
were attacked. During this period, “in St. Petersburg, 30,000, and in
Königsberg, 1,000 persons fell ill each day;” in Rome two-thirds of
the inhabitants were attacked; in Munich, three-fourths; and in
Vienna the severity of the epidemic compelled the authorities to
close the theaters for eight days.
The epidemics of 1788–89, 1799–1800 and of 1802–1803 were
characterized by a relatively lower morbidity than that of 1830–32,
in which the morbidity was again enormous. Likewise in 1833, the
morbidity was very great. In Prague “scarcely a house was spared by
the plague.” In Petrograd, 10,000 persons were attacked; in Berlin at
least 50,000. These are the figures of Hufeland. The Gazette
Médicale records the morbidity as being four-fifths of the total
number of inhabitants of Paris.
In 1836, according to Gluge, 40,000 persons suffered from the
disease in Berlin alone.
In London, in the 1847 epidemic, it has been calculated that at
least 250,000 individuals took sick, and in Paris, according to Marc
d’Espine, between one-fourth and one-half of the population
developed the disease, and in Geneva not less than one-third.
Leichtenstern informs us that in 1890 the early reports were made
by clinical men and were mere presumptions. They were almost
universally higher than the later statistical findings. The early
estimates for the morbidity in several German cities were from 40–
50 per cent. On the other hand, one of the highest statistical reports
recorded by Leichtenstern was for Strasbourg in which 36.5 per cent.
of the individuals became sick. The average morbidity reported by
him ran between 20 and 30 per cent. The difference is accounted for
in part by the fact that some of the very mild cases were not recorded
in the statistics, and in part by the tendency in giving estimates, to
exaggerate.
Auerbach has collected the statistics of 200 families distributed
throughout the city of Cologne. He found that 149 of these families
(75 per cent.) were attacked. In these, 235 were ill—59 men, 95
women, and 81 children. The larger number of women was explained
as due to the illness of the female servants. He estimates each family
as consisting on an average of six individuals, and concludes that 20
per cent. were taken with the disease.
Following the 1889 epidemic, Abbott concluded, on a basis of
questionaires sent out to various individuals and institutions in the
State of Massachusetts, that 39 per cent. of the entire population had
been attacked, in all about 850,000 persons.
Moody and Capps, in December, 1915, and January, 1916, made a
survey of the personnel and inmates of four institutions in Chicago,
the Michael Reese Hospital, the Illinois Training School for Nurses,
the Old Men’s Home, and St. Luke’s Hospital Nurses Training
School, making a total of 677 persons surveyed, of whom 144
developed influenza, making a percentage morbidity of 21. They
remarked that there were many others with colds who remained on
duty and were not included in the table and were not diagnosed as
influenza.
We have already described the relatively low morbidity and
mortality in the early spring epidemic in the United States.
According to Soper, the total number affected in March, 1918, at
Camp Forrest and the Reserve Officers Training Camp in the
Oglethorpe Camps was estimated at 2,900. The total strength at that
time was 28,586. The percentage morbidity then was probably a little
over 10 per cent. Dunlop, in describing the May, 1918, epidemic in
Glasgow, says that it was more limited in extent, as well as milder,
than the later epidemic.
It has been estimated that in the autumn epidemic in the United
States Army Camps one out of every four men had influenza, and one
out of every twenty-four men encamped in this country had
pneumonia. During the four autumn months of 1918, 338,343 cases
of influenza were reported to the Surgeon General’s Office; there
were 61,691 cases of pneumonia.
Woolley reports that among the soldiers at Camp Devens, Mass.
30 per cent. of the population was affected.
At Camp Humphreys, 16 per cent. of the entire personnel
developed the disease. The camp had an average strength of 26,600
individuals. Fifty-two per cent. of the entire number of cases
occurred during the peak week, which ended October 4th. The
outbreak began September 13th and ended October 18th.
Hirsch and McKinney report that an epidemic of unusual virulence
swept with great rapidity through several organizations in Camp
Grant between September 21, 1918, and October 18, 1918. During
this time 9,037 patients were admitted to the Base Hospital,
representing about one-fourth of the strength of the camp, and of
these, 26 per cent. developed pneumonia. About 11 per cent. of the
total admissions or 43 per cent. of the total cases of pneumonia died.
Referring to the report of Howard and Love, we quote as follows:
“It is probable that practically all susceptible human material in
infected camps suffered from an attack of the disease during the
continuance of the epidemic. The records from various camps
indicate that from 15 to 40 per cent. of commands suffered from an
attack of the disease. These records, as previously stated, do not
indicate in full the true incidence of the disease. Certain good results
were accomplished in some camps by the application of effective and
early isolation of patients and suspects and other measures generally
recognized as of value. It was sometimes possible to retard the
progress of the epidemic and cause it to be spread over a longer
period of time. The epidemic thus became less explosive in character,
and fewer people were under treatment at the same time. It was
possible to take better care of the sick and thus reduce the incidence
of and deaths from complicating pneumonia. It has not been shown
that such measures accomplished reduction in the absolute number
of cases of influenza occurring in one command as compared with
another.
“The ‘cantonment’ group of camps gave a much higher death rate
from influenza and its complications than the ‘tent’ camp or
‘departmental’ group. At first glance it would appear that the
different housing conditions and the more marked overcrowding in
cantonments at the time would fully account for this divergence.
Closer study, however, leads to the conclusion that geographical
location was a factor of equal or greater importance. It is well known
that the disease was most virulent and fatal in the northern, eastern
and middle west states, a district in which cantonments
predominated. In the southern and Pacific coast states, where the
most of the tent camps were located, a milder type of the disease
prevailed, with fewer resultant fatalities. Camp Lewis, Washington,
and Camp Gordon, Georgia (both cantonments), had relatively low
death rates, approximating those in nearby tent camps. On the other
hand, Camp Syracuse, New York, and Camp Colt, Pennsylvania (both
tent camps), suffered severely and reported death rates
approximating those of cantonments in the same geographical
district.”
Three waves of influenza are reported by Stanley at San Quentin
Prison. During the early wave it was estimated that over 500 of the
1,900 men in the prison population were ill. The wave lasted for a
little over two weeks. In the second epidemic there were 69 cases in
all, ten per cent. of which developed pneumonia, with two deaths.
There were fewer ambulatory cases than in the first. Three and
seven-tenths per cent. of the population was attacked in the second
epidemic, as compared with 27 per cent. in the first. In the third
epidemic there were 59 cases, with no pneumonia and no deaths.
Hernando estimates that in the Philippine Islands, 40 per cent. of
the total population of 7,000,000 was stricken with the disease. The
epidemic began in June, although it did not become severe until
October. The group of ages that suffered most were those between
ten and twenty-nine years. Hernando does not believe that the
disease was imported because cases were reported before ships
arrived from infected countries. After the importation of cases from
elsewhere the disease assumed the more severe form.
Armstrong, in reporting a survey of 700 influenza convalescents in
Framingham, Mass., remarked that 16 per cent. of the entire
population were infected with influenza. Reeks, in a house survey in
New Britain, Connecticut, found from among 2,757 persons that the
morbidity rate reached 234 per thousand. Dr. Niven found in his
block census in Manchester, England, that of 4,721 individuals, 1,108
(25 per cent.) had developed the disease. Fourteen and eight-tenths

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Printing History and Cultural Change:

Fashioning the Modern English Text in

Memory and Enlightenment: Cultural Afterlives of the

Anonymity in Eighteenth-Century Italian Publishing: The

Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the

Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth

Christology and Metaphysics in the Seventeenth Century

Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century Chamion

The Society of Prisoners: Anglo-French Wars and

A Cross-Cultural History of Britain and Belgium,

Subject: Literary Studies (18th Century)

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

nostalgia of any sort are reliable signs of the counterfeit.

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

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

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

doing that means being honest just as doing it makes you

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

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

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

because of how relentlessly change occurs, good sense has

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

apology to cover the inevitable mistakes.

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

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For Elizabeth Hilliar

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

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xvi List of Illustrations

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

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List of Illustrations xvii

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

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xviii List of Illustrations

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Old Style and New

4 Printing History and Cultural Change

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The Great Divide 5

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6 Printing History and Cultural Change

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The Great Divide 7

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8 Printing History and Cultural Change

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

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

Figure 1.1 Guy Miege, English Grammar (1688).

10 Printing History and Cultural Change

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15 Carter, A Short View of Typography, 92.

The Great Divide 11

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

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12 Printing History and Cultural Change

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27 Lundmark, Quirky Qwerty, 45.

The Great Divide 13