The Typographical Gothic: A Cautionary Note on the Title Page to Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

The "rise of the gothic" in the late eighteenth century is a truism and would seem to require less in the way of evidentiary support than mere confirmation. While we may not all agree on precisely what "the gothic" or "the Gothic" is any more than we might agree on precisely what we mean by "the sublime," we presume that the lack of precision in such terms does not invalidate them. After all, our use of the term gothic is not entirely arbitrary, since we find that word used in the texts of the late eighteenth century we consider central to literary study: Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance and Thomas Warton's History of English Literature. The gothic is, and there's an end on't.

It is not the purpose of this paper to offer a new definition of the gothic nor to critique those that already exist. Rather we will consider how material bibliographical evidence—particular features of particular books—has been deployed in support of these terms. Is it legitimate, or advisable, to raise to the level of a text's meaning those bibliographical and material features of the book, namely its format, layout, and typography, that until the late twentieth century were generally considered extra-textual?¹

Our example is a canonical one: Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765). Obviously, this book must be central to discussions of the gothic in England, but how to define the centrality of this book, and how we define the book itself, is not entirely obvious. Are we simply to say that whatever features this book possesses are by definition gothic? Or can we say that those features that are clearly not gothic in any meaningful way, for example, features that might ordinarily be identified as "classical," must be seen as in dialectic with those that are? There is not any clear way of articulating this question, and it is part of our contention that the way the question is asked will determine to a large extent any conclusions that can be drawn.

The Reliques went through numerous printings in the eighteenth century; copies were and still are readily available.² The first edition is a small, three-volume octavo; it is in format and in its frontispiece identical to the second edition of 1767. Although the text and its various problems have been much discussed in scholarship, the late twentieth century has brought a new aspect of the book into discussion: since the book's texts are central to discussion, so potentially is what might be called its bibliographical form, its typography, layout, and design. A seemingly casual remark by Nick Groom and its more elaborate rebuttal by Christine Baatz pose the central problem we look at here. To Groom, the book's typography is gothic, pure and simple: "Percy's title pages were Gothic in their very profusion of typefaces and rambling lines." Christine Baatz, looking in large part at the collection of title pages published by Nicolas Barker, notes that the Percy title page also contains features that are classical; therefore, "In the Reliques a sophisticated typographical programme is used to achieve a twofold aim: first, to claim 'classical' quality for the texts presented, . . . second, to stress the texts' different, indigenous, 'Gothic' nature."³ The implied dispute between Groom and Baatz concerns only the extent to which the gothic exists and how it is used in the title page, the facing frontispiece, and in the typography of the text pages; they do not consider the more fundamental question of whether the gothic can be found or should be sought in these features, nor what it means to assume that such a thing as...