Anonymity and Authorship

The standard version of the rise of the professional author in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries links professionalization with the name of the author. Largely derived from Foucault’s influential essay “What is an Author?”, this story tells how the author’s new status, “a privileged moment of individualization,” is underwritten by copyright legislation. The author becomes an owner of intellectual property and takes his or her place in an emerging bourgeois society. The “author-function,” in Foucault’s exposition, is defined by the name of the author. In an earlier period, literary texts were anonymous whereas scientific texts were named until a reversal occurred:

There was a time when texts that we today call “literary” (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of the author; their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. On the other hand, those texts that we now would call scientific—those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illness, natural sciences and geography—were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as “true,” only when marked with the name of the author. . . . A reversal occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. ¹

In response to this dating, Roger Chartier showed that the author-function for literature existed in the Middle Ages as well, and indeed, since Foucault provides no evidence but his own authority, there seems to be little reason to assume that readers’ or hearers’ interest in authors as the originators of works began in what is now referred to as the early modern period. ² But if naming occurs much earlier, or, rather, appears to exist as far back as we can go, and thus puts in question the neat chronology of the story, it is also the case that anonymity does not simply disappear with the emergence of a commercial culture. While there is certainly much less authorial anonymity today than several centuries ago, we are misled if we assume that it is simply a matter of a “reversal.” My suspicion is that a twentieth-century phenomenon has been projected backwards; early indications of a process that would take a century or more to complete were treated as though they were themselves signs of the completed process. It seems significant, however, that both Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, among others, wrote about anonymity sixty or seventy years ago. Woolf, for instance, made notes towards a literary history that made much of the disappearance of anonymity, which, according to her, took place in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the dominance of print over oral culture. ³ This is not true, of course, but it would be interesting to ask what it was in Woolf’s own time that led her to that question. Perhaps anonymity was vanishing in her own moment, or perhaps as I indeed suspect, in different ways it is still with us.

In any case, the standard narrative is a story of identity emerging out of anonymity. Interestingly enough, as Woolf’s version suggests, this seems to have happened twice, for the story of the rise of the individual in the Renaissance is exactly parallel to the story of the rise of the individual in the Romantic period. ⁴ For the moment, however, I want to focus on the development of copyright in the eighteenth century and its relation to naming.

The lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1695, which had ensured both censorship prior to publication and the continued monopoly of the London printers and booksellers through the Stationers’ Company, established conditions needed for the expansion of the market for printed materials in the eighteenth century. ⁵ With all restrictions removed on the number of printers and their location (it had been twenty, confined to London, aside from the presses at Oxford and Cambridge), and with no requirement to register books with the Stationers (so that two books only were registered in 1702), publication mushroomed and authorship became a trade. ⁶ By mid-century, writers such as Johnson...