Grandison's Grandeur as Printed Book: A Look at the Eighteenth-Century Novel's Quest for Status

Grandisona Grandeur as Printed Book: A Look at the Eighteenth-Century Novel's Quest for Status Janine Barchas Samuel Richardson's TheHistory ofSir Charles Grandison (1753-54) offers a noteworthy eighteenth-century example ofwhat Gérard Genette terms "paratext," that is, the liminal devices and conventions that mediate a book to the reader.1 In the physical production of his final novel, Richardson appended addenda of all kinds, increasing the bulk of his already mammoth epistolary narrative with an extensive machinery of framing puffs and catalogues.2 At the 1 Gérard Genette, Paralexls: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2 Prompted by the Dublin piracy of Grandison in November of 1753, Richardson hurriedly printed the first and second editions—a duodecimo edition in seven volumes and a more luxurious octavo edition in six volumes—concurrently over the next five months. Richardson employed the services of several other printing shops for the rapid production of these first two editions. Such collaboration was not uncommon and would not have undermined Richardson's ultimate control over the visual design of Grandison. Richardson printed a third, revised edition in duodecimo in March of 1754, and was near completing a fourth edition (also in duodecimo) when he died inJuly of 1761. The paratextual frame ofcatalogues under discussion is present in every edition printed before his death. For further details of Grandison's production and publication history see William Merritt Sale,Jr, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record of His Literary Career with Historical Notes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), pp. 65-93; andJocelyn Harris, "The Reviser Observed: The Last Volume of Sir Charles Grandison," Studies in Bibliography 29 (1976), 1-31. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 674EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION start of the work he included a self-congratulatory Preface, a laudatory sonnet by T[homas] E[dwards], and a one-page catalogue of the story's characters labelled "Names of the Principal Persons." At end of the final volume he supplied his reader with "A Concluding Note by the Editor"; an "Address to the Public" complaining of the novel's Dublin piracy; an awkward compilation ofthe book's "Similes and Allusions"; and a hundred-page "Historical and Characteristical Index." The complementary pair of framing catalogues—the list of characters at the front of Grandison and the lengthy index at the back—constitute the twin focus of this case study in the eighteenthcentury novel's self-presentation as a printed book.3 The Grandison inventories demonstrate an affinity with other types of lists found in the eighteenth-century novel and reflect the culture of collecting and the taxonomic endeavour that existed in the breeding ground of the new species ofwriting. As interpretive tools attached to a particular book, these flanking catalogues guide the reader of Grandisono^ exerting influence over both the anticipation and the recollection ofthe novel. The design ofthe prefatorylist predisposes a reader to navigate the text and its characters along a specific set of moral and social axes. Conversely, the index exerts control over a reader's recollection, or revisitation, of specific moments in the narrative. To shape his paratextual packaging, Richardson borrowed from other genres in eighteenth-century print culture— particularly drama and science. In so doing, he self-consciously positioned the novel within established print tradition and consequently staked a claim for the cultural permanence and moral utility of his new genre. Lists crowd the early English novel. Long before they embrace the novel materially, as do the indexing appendages of Grandison or the tables of contents found in other novels, they elbow their way into the central narratives of early fictions thinly disguised as verbal narrative. Textual collections, itemizations, and enumerations 3 This essay forms but a small part of a larger book project on the topic of graphic design and the eighteenth-century novel, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Because Samuel Richardson served simultaneously as printer, publisher, and author of all his fictions , a discussion of the graphic design of Grandison avoids some of the larger problematics surrounding an author's control over the physical production of a work—problematics that come into play when considering other...