Everywhere and Nowhere: Anonymity and Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Mark Vareschi (review)

Among the many satiric jokes that Alexander Pope integrates into The Dunciad Variorum of 1729, one of the most effective is deploying his mock-editorial apparatus to contextualize the motive and matter of the poem in the conspicuousness of his own name in print and the relative anonymity of his antagonists. In a “Letter to the Publisher” prefixed to the poem, the “esteem’d” reputation of “Mr. POPE” is juxtaposed against the ephemeral pamphlets and periodical essays of authors who are deemed “too obscure for Satyre” and of whom “scarce one is known by sight.” Pope’s pseudonymous editor, Martinus Scriblerus, is made to explain that The Dunciad takes as its “occasion” the “deluge of authors” who have flooded the literary marketplace because of an “unlimited” proliferation of printing and publishing. Not only do London’s hacks and dunces harass “the honest unwriting subject,” according to Scriblerus, but they “publish slanders unpunish’d, the authors being anonymous.” In the poem itself, each “vile class of writers” is assigned “some proper name.” Yet throughout the variorum apparatus, Pope’s opponents are summarily dismissed as “modern Authors” or “this or that Scribler.” And in the ironic “Index of Things (including Authors),” professional writers like Charles Gildon, James Moore Smith, and Leonard Welsted lose their identity and agency by being grouped alongside “Asses,” “Opiates,” “Whirligigs,” and other inanimate objects. Regardless of whether or not attacks on “Mr. POPE” were attributed or published anonymously—“Testimonies of Authors avowed, or of Authors concealed”—the cumulative effect of The Dunciad Variorum is to render bad authors nameless and to equate namelessness with “Chaos, Night and Dulness.”

Although neither Pope nor The Dunciad are mentioned in Everywhere and Nowhere, Mark Vareschi’s fascinating study of anonymity and mediation in eighteenth-century Britain can be read as a corrective to Pope’s cynical account of the “Liberty of the Press” and the literary and cultural degradation that he believed was a consequence of anonymous publication. In fact, the absence of “Mr. POPE” from this book on authorial absence seems calculated to allow Vareschi to legitimize less conspicuous authors who, he explains, “consciously acted to withhold their names from texts” (9). The book thus draws attention to texts in which anonymity represents an “absence” and to many others in which “Mr. Anonymous” is reflexively made an “explicit presence” (31). Vareschi dedicates much of his introduction to careful bibliometric analysis intended to illustrate his central claim that attributed authorship was “far from the norm” (1). Based on data drawn from the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), and compared against notable eighteenth-century catalogues, he estimates that an average of one-fifth (21.1%) of the texts published in any given year between 1700 and 1799 appeared without authorial attribution. If the lack of a name on a title page has often encouraged us to think of anonymity as existing “nowhere,” Vareschi’s detailed charts and graphs conversely suggest that anonymous authorship was “typical and therefore everywhere” (1). Far from being an exception to be satirized or explained away by truisms about authors wishing to avoid social impropriety or legal liability, anonymity was rather fundamental to the production, circulation, and reception of eighteenth-century British literature.

Vareschi argues not only that anonymity was “ubiquitous” during the period, but that it functioned as an important literary paradigm through which authors could negotiate a complex “network of mediation” that included publishers, editors, theatre managers, performers, advertisers, proprietors of circulating libraries, critics, and, of course, media-savvy readers who frequently did not know (and did not necessarily care) who wrote one or another work (64). By analyzing the various forms of media that mediate or intervene between eighteenth-century texts and their readers, Vareschi aims to shift focus away from the individual author and towards what he describes as “the collective agencies that make up literary phenomena” (34). Everywhere and Nowhere challenges us to...