Nameless Names: Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity

THESE DAYS, TO WRITE ANONYMOUS or pseudonymous books is to aim for an effect. In fact, there are hardly any works of literature which fall into the former category: Joe Klein's "novel of politics," Primary Colors (1996), is an obvious exception, and the absence of an authorial attribution may be the most noteworthy feature of the entire text. Similarly when Doris Lessing produced The Diaries of Jane Somers in 1984, it was the suppression of her famous name which lent point to the enterprise—allegedly her aim was to show how differently books of unknown writers were treated. Many authors, of course, use a nom de plume, but in serious literature they generally stick to one or two: only in the realm of popular genres such as Harlequin novels or mystery fiction are multiple identities common. "Literary" writers who break this rule tend to find themselves caught up in scandal, as when "Anthony Burgess" (John Burgess Wilson) reviewed—not too favorably—his own Inside Mr. Enderby (1963), written by "Joseph Kell," for the Yorkshire Post. He was fired when the truth came out. Today authorship and authority have become inextricably linked, and literature without a responsible agent identified is like an artifact that turns up in the saleroom lacking a decent provenance. Both anonymity and pseudonymity have become suspect behavior.

Of course, it was not always so. We have only to think of the major texts written in the long eighteenth century to appreciate this fact. Hardly any of Dryden's original poems (this is to exclude his Fables and translations) bore his name. The situation is similar with Aphra Behn, and other founding documents of the English novel, such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, appeared without any clue of authorship. So it goes on, with Samuel Richardson present only as printer, and covertly as editor, of his novels; then, too, with Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, although the latter does use the increasingly popular formula "by the author of RODERICK RANDOM." Fanny Burney's almost over-determined anonymity is well known. ¹ Likewise Jane Austen is either "a Lady" or "the author of 'Pride and Prejudice', &c." (With Walter Scott, the phrase "the author of Waverley" moves from a disguise to a kind of banner or trademark.) In other cases writers shift between open and disguised publication: the most interesting case is Alexander Pope, to whom I shall return shortly. It would be possible to categorize these examples by various factors, such as genre, gender, or celebrity of the author. However, the general picture would remain the same: there is nothing suspicious in principle about anonymous publication, whatever the motive for its use.

Some of these motives are self-evident. If Jonathan Swift wanted to deceive the bench of Irish bishops, he could hardly have allowed his own name to accompany, and in practice supersede, Lemuel Gulliver's on the title-page. Robinson Crusoe is putatively "written by himself," and all three parts keep up this fiction: just as Moll Flanders is "written from her own memorandums," and the Journal of the Plague Year "written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London" (here we see the alleged author not just as a persona but depicted as an authority on the title-page). A little more shyly, The Vicar of Wakefield is "supposed to be written by himself," although Goldsmith weakens the effect by signing the advertisement. In the case of Tristram Shandy, the author's supposed anonymity survived until his signature appeared at the end of the dedication incorporated into volume five (1762), three years after the first installment came out. Further cases exist where the basic fictional pretence of a given book requires that the writer should keep out of the action: thus The Castle of Otranto offers itself as "translated by William Marshall, Gent. From the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto," a sequence which would be fatally disturbed if...