Fact, Fiction, and Anonymity: Reading Love and Madness: A Story Too True (1780)

Fact, Fiction, and Anonymity: Reading Love and Madness: A Story Too True (1780) RobertJ. Griffin Widi several recent publications, and more on die way, awareness ofdie extent and significance ofanonymous publication is increasing.1 Holding diat anonymityvanished with die appearance of the printing press (as Virginia Woolf believed) is no longer tenable; asserting (as Michel Foucault did) diat anonymity disappeared widi die arrival ofcopyright laws is no longer possible. We are learning diat unsigned, or pseudonymously signed, publication was die norm of print culture at least up dirough die middle of die nineteenth century. The hard statistics for the eighteenth-century and early nineteendi-century novel are astounding: in die last halfofdie eighteentii century (1750-99), nearly 80 per cent ofall novels were published anonymously; in the first decades ofdie nineteentii century that number falls to 50 per cent (widi more women signing dieir names dian men), but by 1830 die number of anonymous novels returns tojust under 80 per cent2 We are only beginning to explore die implications ofso much anonymity for die history ofaudiorship 1 See, for example, "Anonymity and Authorship," New Literary History 30:4 (1999), 877-95; a Special Issue on Anonymity of New Literary History 33:2 (2002); The Faces ofAnonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publicationfrom theSixteenth to the Twentieth Century (NewYork: Palgrave, 2003); and MarcyL. North, TheAnonymousRenaissance: CulturesofDiscretion in TudorStuartEngland (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2003). 2 James Raven, The Anonymous Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1830," Faces ofAnonymity, pp. 141-66. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 4,JuIy 2004 620 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION and die history of die book more generally. Anonymity opens up important questions for the history ofreading as well. Recent work in die history ofreading has critiqued die limitations of both the narratological model of die implied reader or narratee and the phenomenological model ofa universalized process oftextactualization precisely by returning history to the table. Correlated widi die quantitive study ofmanuscript and book production and die spread of literacy, diis scholarship makes us more sensitive to the shifting status ofreading in different communities at different times, as well as to die historicity of different modes of reading (silent or aloud, alone or in a group, intensive or extensive), and to die way die physicality of the object helps determine how it will be read.3 I attempt to take this line of inquiry a step further by bringing a modified version of a phenomenological model back into the equation and offering a plausible reconstruction of a process performed by readers ofanonymous texts in die eighteenth century. This recovery is necessarily highly speculative, but it is grounded in contemporary reviews, letters, and marginalia, as well as, ofcourse, in a close reading of the text. Attention to the specific context of reception, when read together widi specific textual features, yields clues to an identifiable epistemology ofreading. In particular, within die context ofanonymity in die eighteenth century, the question of attribution (who wrote this?) often turns out to be a question ofgenre (am I reading a fiction or not?). The significance ofthe absence ofan author's name in the process ofreading has been obscured because, after die fact, many writers of eighteenth-century books have become known. We approach our reading widi a knowledge not available to the original audience, and thus have not fully appreciated die uncertainty taken for granted by eighteenth-century (and indeed nineteenth-century) readers. An epigram on the tide page ofa volume of die Monthly Review for 1780 declares: "No trusting to Title Pages." I doubt diis was meant to suggest, reflexively, that readers should wonder if they were actually looking at a copy of the Monthly Review. Rather, it was a playful recognition of the precariousness, and perhaps of the frustration, of die reviewer's (or indeed any reader's) position in a culture in which 3 For recent work, see A History ofReading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), and The Practice and Representation ofReading in England, ed.James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). LOVE AND MADNESS621 die majority ofbooks were published widiout any indication ofwho actually wrote them...