Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (review)

Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. By Margaret J. M. Ezell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. x+182. $38.50.

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." So declared Samuel Johnson, a remark invoked twice by Margaret Ezell in Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. What this says about Technology and Culture reviewers is unclear, but, in any case, Johnson's words are contradicted by the current explosion of unremunerated literary activity on countless homemade websites. Lots of people, it turns out, quite willingly write for free, though in most cases one wishes they would not. The greatest catalyst in recent years has been the Internet, which lets anyone be an author, just as Harvard Square lets anyone be a musician. Unlike any previous form of publication, the Internet allows a piece of writing to be distributed almost instantaneously around the world to millions of people who do not want to read it. This phenomenon of technology altering relations between writer and reader is not new, of course, and a parallel example from three centuries ago is the subject of Ezell's study.

Printing was invented long before the seventeenth century, but in Britain a series of legal changes were needed to make it a feasible option for most writers. The expiration of government licensing of presses in 1695, followed by a first step toward clarification of copyright in 1709, began the transition of authorship from a pastime to a profession. According to Ezell, scholars ever since have assumed that under the new rules, anyone talented enough to get his or her writing printed would do so. Thus they have restricted their canon to published materials.

Yet writers and poets retained a low-tech alternative: "social authorship," in which hand-copied work was circulated among family, friends, and acquaintances. In the era covered by Ezell's study, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, many fastidious authors shunned the vulgar forum of print, with its availability to the masses and great potential for transcription errors. Nonetheless, in a familiar pattern, the arrival of a new technology caused fresh meanings to be attached to an old one. Anyone who has been called a Luddite for not owning a Palm Pilot will understand how this process works.

Ezell details the prevalence and dynamics of social authorship as well as the obstacles facing writers who wished to have their work published. She points out the class and gender dimensions of exclusion (and self-exclusion) from print and urges a greater recognition of social authors in the British literary landscape. In brief, Ezell eloquently challenges her fellow scholars' equation, conscious or unconscious, of authorship with publication.

Bearing in mind Ezell's caution against assuming that writers and readers of three centuries ago thought the same as those of today, we should be wary of drawing too many parallels between social authorship and the Internet. As she points out, attaching excessive importance to the physical artifacts of type and binding has distorted scholars' perceptions of literary history. But it would be equally wrong to attach excessive importance to the lack of these artifacts and thereby make seventeenth-century literary circles into yet another "Internet of ------," as the telegraph is sometimes said to be the Internet of the 1840s, the telephone of the 1870s, or rural free delivery of the 1890s.

Contrary to Johnson, people write for any number of reasons besides money: fame, prestige, self-expression, self-esteem, tenure, the desire to disseminate one's ideas, or to make one's mother proud. The advent of print rendered many of these goals possible by expanding the pools of readers and writers beyond those connected by chains of acquaintance. The Internet goes a step further by vastly increasing the pools and unbundling the goals--that is, by letting writers pursue fame without a printing press, which would be necessary to achieve prestige or tenure. The same process of...