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If some devotees of imaginative expansion busied themselves with visualizing the passions involved in key moments of an originary text, other readers took a cue from a different aspect of theater (the revival of popular characters in new plays) and invented further adventures for beloved characters which stepped outside the chronological bounds of that text. In this chapter we will investigate this second principal form of imaginative expansion , what I would like to term “character migration.”1 Through this practice , readers imagined characters’ lives as extending off-page in ways which suggested their fundamental independence and detachability, their capacity to migrate both into new texts and into the lives of the readers themselves. Despite the origins of this practice in the theater—which is also the origin for most of the characters in question—the vast majority of the character migrations I have discovered take advantage of the allographic logic of print, its ability to make characters take on a placeless omnipresence. So where my second chapter concerned itself with readers expanding nontheatrical texts along theatrical lines, my third investigates how readers invented further adventures for theatrical characters as if they were fundamentally akin to the figures in a novel or newspaper sketch. Of course, as my last chapter argued, print and the theater, for all their manifest differences, are complementary modes of iterability when it comes to the creation of the textual commons. Accordingly, we will see how, by virtue of their familiarity through both theater and print, characters like Sir Roger de Coverly, Falstaff, and Ranger (from Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband) could not only be sent on further adventures but also regarded as readers’“old friends,” figures who could serve as the rallying point for a virtual sociability modeled upon more traditional modes of embodied social interaction. Indeed, even when such characters were not being sent upon further adventures, their newfound status as “old friends” fully capable of embarking upon such adventures nonetheless served to underscore their social canonicity (or at the very least Chapter  Character Migration, Detachability, Old Friends their authors’ ambition to attain such canonicity). Hence, this chapter not only reconstructs a fascinating and hitherto largely ignored reading practice ; it also sheds light upon an important and underconsidered aspect of eighteenth-century canonicity more generally.2 A single example should suffice for the purposes of introducing the practice. In , a Mr. Dorman of Hampstead published an afterpiece entitled Sir Roger de Coverly: or, The Merry Christmas. As its title suggests, Dorman ’s “Dramatic Entertainment of Two Acts” stars the foxhunting squire of the Spectator papers, along with Will Wimble and Mr. Spectator himself. The plot itself is rather slight, but that does not seem to have mattered much. The important thing, Dorman tells us in his preface, is that through this “Entertainment” we get to see yet another aspect of Sir Roger: namely, how he deals with the rustics on his estate when they try to put on a mildly satiric Christmas review for him and his guests. Presumably, these events are a fleshing out of his fleeting allusion in number  of The Spectator to how, at Christmas time, his “Tenants pass away a whole Evening in playing their innocent Tricks, and smutting one another” (:). By giving us more Sir Roger, Dorman claims that he is conducting the squire “quietly, into the Mansions of his Friends, where he will be treated with all the Gentleness, Candour, and Good-Nature he can possibly wish for.”3 That is, he is reuniting Sir Roger with his “Friends” through the writing of a text into which he could migrate, by creating additional adventures for him beyond those recounted in The Spectator. I begin with this example, despite the atypicality of Sir Roger’s origins, because it neatly encapsulates two of the principal concerns of this chapter: the ways in which print and theater, as complementary modes of iterability, could make a character seem detachable from his originary context and the desire to figure the virtual community which forms around such a character as a network of friends bound together through that character. Let us consider these points in turn. Sir Roger de Coverly began, of course, as a print fiction. We are first introduced to him as a member of Mr. Spectator’s club who ensures “that nothing may be written or publish’d to the Prejudice or Infringement of [Country Squires’] just Rights and Privileges.”4 Beginning with number  readers encountered him on an almost daily...

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