Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 by Aileen Douglas (review)

Aileen Douglas's monograph builds on a wide-ranging body of scholarship that considers the processes and remediations of script and print in the long eighteenth century. While situating its concerns against such influential studies as Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing (1988); Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (1999); and Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (1990), Douglas's interest and inroads are both materialist and discursive in focus. Thus, while she builds on Siskin's theme of the "work of writing," and frequently discusses the relations between writing technology, notions of labour, and the intellectual and physical purposes of writing, her research questions largely revolve around the physical and material processes involved in learning to write and the dissemination of script in print. At the same time, and as Douglas's frequent recourse to Foucauldian concepts of discipline foregrounds, this study approaches writing as discourse: that is, "as instrumental in the fabrication and rendering visible of the modern individual" (10). She exemplifies this bodily expression through the ambivalent metonymic implications of the "author's hand," pointing out its emergence as a printed object of value and scrutiny, as well as its association with the labour of "mere writing" (14).

The binary values of "mere writing" versus the "specialised work of writers" (17) in print are nicely epitomized in Douglas's opening example from Daniel Defoe's An Essay upon Literature (1726), where he observes that "since the Art of Printing has been invented, the laborious part of Writing is taken off, and the Copying or Writing of Books is at an end" (1). As Douglas shows, Defoe is actually more complimentary about the art of writing than this quotation suggests (for example, he still values it as an essential part of education), but his diminution of writing as a type of physical rather than mental labour is indicative of his sense of the critical ascendancy of print in the early eighteenth century. This is also a privilege that Douglas maintains throughout her study. There is little engagement with materiality and medium in the form of manuscript culture, which is a significant and problematic omission. Indeed, while she notes that it has been easy to align "'writing' with print alone" and to neglect "the considerable power script still retained as a writing technology" (3), this study is less than holistic in its own approach to what Margaret Ezell and others have shown is a mixed manuscript and print economy.

Nevertheless, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars of manuscript and print will find much of value in Douglas's work. The well-researched chapters provide a trove of information from fictional and non-fictional texts across the period. At the same time, Douglas never loses sight of the theoretical concerns and sheer complexity of the material. Her opening remediation explores the transformation of the autograph from an authenticating function in script (think signatures) to an expressive act through the world of engraved facsimiles (she cites the well-known example of Richardson's experimentation with fonts in Clarissa). Reversing the emphasis in previous studies, though, Douglas questions the evidence for handwriting as the "medium of the self in contradistinction to print" (10), and, instead, posits that script in print (that is, engraving) had the most impact on writers in the period. She is quick to acknowledge that her primary interest is not in opposing script to print, but in questioning "how a print author's scribal acts and practices may best be understood" (13). This subtle questioning of the direction of influence and of the factors involved is both refreshing and thought-provoking.

A benefit for busy scholars, this relatively short monograph comprises an introduction and seven chapters (each a considerable case study in itself) that are dealt with at a brisk pace in just 201 pages. The early chapters, "Seeing...