Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain by Joad Raymond (review)

63 Ballaster often relies on extensive plot summary of unfamiliar texts that are not included in the companion volume, like Count Anthony Hamilton’s ‘‘History of the Thorn-flower,’’ or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘‘Sultan’s Tale,’’ or Maria Edgeworth’s ‘‘Murad the Unlucky.’’ The relationship between the two volumes remains problematic. Like Felicity Nussbaum’s Torrid Zones (1995) and Jonathan Lamb’s Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001), to mention only two examples, Ms. Ballaster’s books reveal eighteenthcentury scholars’ continuing interest in the ways English readers and writers assimilated , re-imagined, and wrote tales from and about the rest of the world. But they also suggest some of the difficulties we have in grasping the complexities of that fraught relationship. Elizabeth Wanning Harries Smith College JOAD RAYMOND. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2003. Pp. xviii ⫹ 403. £60. In the past fifteen years, Mr. Raymond has added significantly to our understanding of the emergence and development of newsbooks, newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain purports to tell ‘‘the story of the advent of the pamphlet as an object and a concept in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’’ As well he might, Mr. Raymond regrets being unable to cover the century after 1688— the period which readers of the Scriblerian may well regard as the golden age of English pamphleteering—because the omission complicates the four ‘‘general theses’’ he advances about the pamphlet ‘‘as an object and a concept .’’ He supports the first of these—that ‘‘the pamphlet is a form that requires a complex and historically relative definition ’’—by tracing the etymology of the word, ‘‘pamphlet,’’ from its first appearance in English in the fifteenth century through various shifts in meaning prior to its entry into common use in the years after 1588 so that ‘‘[b]y 1700 everyone knew what a pamphlet was and what it did.’’ A pamphlet, according to Mr. Raymond, ‘‘typically consisted of between one sheet and a maximum of twelve sheets, or between eight and ninety-six pages in quarto.’’ While this may be true in the case of early ‘‘pamphlets ,’’ it presents problems as far as the longer ‘‘pamphlets’’ published in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are concerned, as is indicated by his own comments on Marvell’s Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government. ‘‘This was first published anonymously as a quarto pamphlet of 191 ⁄2 sheets—overlong for a pamphlet,’’ he remarks, ‘‘but it is recognisably one in other aspects, and was so described by contemporaries.’’ Many other publications running to considerably more than ninety-six quarto pages were called ‘‘pamphlets’’ by contemporaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Thus while a ‘‘full confutation’’ of the 171 pages of Perceval’s Faction Detected by the Evidence of Facts (1743) commented on ‘‘the almost immeasurable Length of your Work,’’ it clearly identified it as a pamphlet and treated it as such. As Erasmus Lewis explained to Swift in 1737 when he was trying to persuade him not to publish his History of the Four Last Years of the Queen: ‘‘It is now too late to publish a 64 pamphlet, and too early to publish a history .’’ Those who, in recent years, have worked on early modern political pamphlets , from Marprelate to Wollstonecraft , are unlikely to find anything controversial in Mr. Raymond’s second and third general theses about the pamphlet ‘‘as an object and a concept.’’ I have no difficulty with the suggestions that pamphlets ‘‘are literary texts, often highly artful and indirect, and appreciated with reference not only to immediate social and political context, but to the traditions and conventions of pamphleteering ,’’ or that the transformation in ‘‘the role of printing and its relationship to the public’’ that occurred between 1500 and 1700 ‘‘was partly effected by and through pamphlets,’’ although I suspect that the most important contribution was in fact the establishment of a system of distribution in the 1640s. ‘‘Appeals to opinion carried new weight,’’ Mr. Raymond remarks about the ‘‘printing revolution ’’ that took place between 1641 and 1660: ‘‘the public were empowered, and the relevance of its opinion in political life...