In Other Words: Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Ornaments of Print

HISTORY OF THE BOOK In Other Words: Eighteenth-Century Authorship and the Ornaments of Print Christopher Flint In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson observes, regarding the display ofobjects in a still life, that "Whether to see it as trivial, base and unworthy of serious attention, or to see it otherwise, is very much a matter ofhistory and ideology."1 Bryson is discussing a particular genre in the visual arts, but we might also apply his observation to visual elements in a literary text. What we look at when reading in modern print culture, typographical marks on the page, is often overlooked by theories of textuality. One problem, especially when we read a modern edition of a work, is that it can often be difficult to align the specific marks on a page with the cultural context within which those marks were produced. As long as we have an "original" edition before us, we can draw relevant conclusions from the nature of the paper, ink, type, and font employed, but perceiving how printed marks per se operate as "independent" signs in semantic space may be a more intractable goal. Another problem is that we are distracted , quite reasonably, from the meaning of individual marks by our need to situate them within an overall discursive field: that is, we want to know how these marks contribute to the generation of meaningful words and phrases. Not all marks on a page, however, indicate specific linguistic content. Whereas "verbal text" contains 1 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: FourEssays on StillLife Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 14. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 628EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION elements of grammar, style, and usage that help identify its historical specificity, other elements of a printed work are not so easily transferred or historicized. In this essay, I suggest that in the eighteenth century certain typographical marks, called printer's ornaments, had a peculiar semantic charge, especially as employed in prose fiction, that might very well differentiate them from earlier or later uses. A row of asterisks, for example, would call up a set of associations different from those in a manuscript era or a late print culture such as our own. Asterisks, in other words, belong to the printed matter of a text and call up both history and ideology. This essay seeks to place the asterisk and other similar ornaments into an historical context; that is, to give an overview of the overlooked. Overview Late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century prognostications about the press in England frequently display an almost missionary zeal when recording the impact of print technology on cultural advancement . Poems, such as the anonymous "Poem on the Invention ofPrinting," extolled the capacity of the "Press" to "occupy its pow'rs in virtue's cause; / Chaste erudition freely to impart, / And improve, but ne'er corrupt, the reader's heart." Print histories of the period routinely praised the rationalizing force of the medium, regarding it as the means to create history and instil public-mindedness. In The Originali and Growth ofPrinting (1664), Richard Atkyns claims that "Printing is of so Divine a Nature, that it makes a Thousand years but as yesterday ... and so Spirituali withall, that it flyes into all parts of the World without Wearines ... [where] it hastens Virtue and dispells Ignorance." Even printers' manuals, ostensibly intended to be neutrally descriptive, praised printing as the "science of sciences." The history of reading, as John Brewer suggests, confirms the pervasive impact if not the moral efficacy that these reports attribute to print: "Books, print and readers were everywhere. Not everyone was a reader, but even those who could not read lived to an unprecedented degree in a culture of print, for the impact of the publishing revolution extended beyond the literate."2 2 Anon., "Poem on the Invention of Printing," Flowers ofEnglish Printing (London, 1809), p. 156; Richard Atkyns, The Originali and Growth ofPrinting (London, 1664), p. 2; Joseph AUTHORSHIP AND ORNAMENTS OF PRINT 629 In the eighteenth century, England witnessed a dramatic consolidation ofprint technology and dissemination that included passage of modern copyright law; the emergence ofwholesale marketing, copyowning congers, and trade sales...