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Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653–1759 by Harold Weber (review) - The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
- The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats
- Volume 42, Number 1, Autumn 2009
- pp. 54-55
- 10.1353/scb.2009.0057
- Review
- Additional Information
54 HAROLD WEBER. Memory, Print, and Gender in England, 1653–1759. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Pp. x ⫹ 262. $89.95. In this ambitious meditation on the intricate relationship between the formation of literary canons and the commercial production of printed texts, Mr. Weber focuses primarily on four works—Cavendish’s Poems, and Fancies (1653), Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. A Poem. In IV Books. To which is added Samson Agonistes (1671), Pope’s The Dunciad (1728–1743), and Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1759). Notwithstanding the eccentric chronology cited in this book’s title (referring to the time between Cavendish’s publication and the year when Richardson was supposedly still revising his magnum opus), Mr. Weber depicts these authors coping with the ephemeral marketplace of print while seeking a permanent place in literary history. As a remarkably self-assertive aristocratic woman, Cavendish (the Duchess of Newcastle) presents a caricature of the writer, male or female, seeking lasting fame from the printing world to the extent of declaring outrageously that ‘‘All the materials in my head did grow, / All is my own, and nothing do I owe.’’ Although she wrote both an autobiography and a biography of her husband, Mr. Weber ignores these obvious sources while trying to explain her ‘‘conspicuous individuality.’’ More attention to her interests in atomistic theory, Hobbes, and the New Science would have helped our understanding of the determined avoidance of conventional religion in her writings. While reviewing Milton’s career during and after the Civil War, Mr. Weber stresses the poet’s recognition that books were potentially dangerous and should be subject to post-publication censorship. Despite the soaring rhetoric of Areopagitica on intellectual freedom, Milton’s real target, we are to understand, is the Stationers’ Company , which had sought to regulate publishing as if books were just another economic commodity, like textiles or other manufactured goods. In Milton’s Latin ode Ad Ioannem Rousium, addressed to the Bodleian librarian John Rouse, Mr. Weber emphasizes the ‘‘simple and stark contrast between the order, security, and serenity of Oxford and its library, and the disorder, uncertainty, and tumult of the rest of England.’’ Mr. Weber argues further that Milton is not only referring to the political upheaval in his lifetime but also to the spectacle of a noisy commercial book market run by illiterate booksellers as opposed to a timeless circle of ideal readers. In discussing the nexus between Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published together in 1671, Mr. Weber explains the contrast between ‘‘true glory’’ and mere ‘‘blaze of fame,’’ as depicted in Jesus’s conflict with Satan in the wilderness and the blind Samson’s political isolation—both parallel to Milton’s own predicament of having supported the republican cause and subsequently ending his life in Restoration England . From Milton’s fundamental distrust of the ‘‘vulgar’’ readership on the rise in his time, the chapter on Pope guides us to the apocalyptic vision of Dulness ushering in Chaos and eternal Night triumphing over cultural memory in The Dunciad, a satire that ‘‘immortalizes its poet by firmly grounding him within the mundane and transitory reality of his time, surrounding him, indeed overwhelming him with the writers , booksellers, printers, and publishers who populated the early-eighteenth-century book trade.’’ 55 After some interesting connections between Milton’s and Pope’s negative stances toward their contemporary world of printed media, Mr. Weber turns to Richardson’s Clarissa because of its obsessive concern with the material basis of the narrative itself: ‘‘The 537 letters that compose their story must be accounted for, collected, archived, and preserved, rather than allowed to disappear into Pope’s airy nothingness .’’ But when evoking Pope’s attack on ‘‘blest paper-credit’’ in the Epistle to Bathurst and linking it to Richardson’s material reliance on paper as a printer, Mr. Weber blurs the larger issue of how this London businessman also distrusted airy economic schemes and equated libertinism (‘‘free-thinking,’’ ‘‘Deism’’) to bankruptcy. As in other interdisciplinary approaches to ‘‘print culture,’’ this study promises more than it can provide. It scarcely acknowledges the importance of reprinting done by the booksellers who helped drive the literary marketplace by enhancing consumer demand for the canonical English authors...