Bookselling and Canon-Making: The Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776–1783

Bookselling and Canon-Making:zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQP The Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776-1783 THOMAS F. BONNELL Some months before his improbable encounter with Victor Frankenstein on the arctic seas, Robert Walton wrote to his sister in England, Mrs. Saville. Friendless and impatient at delays in the port of Archangel, he reminisced: “for the first fourteen years of my life I ran wild on a common, and read nothing but our Uncle Thomas’s books of voyages. At that age I became acquainted with the celebrated poets of our own country.” When did this poetic discovery take place? Details in the epis­ tolary framework to Frankenstein hint at the period to which Mary Shelley alludes. Dated 28 March 17 — , Walton’s letter invokes Col­ eridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” making the year 1798 or 1799, and the author identifies himself as twenty-eight years old.1 His four­ teenth year, therefore, when he turned from voyages to poetry, must have been 1784 or 1785. The “celebrated poets” he came to know were likely the ones just then enshrined as “English classics.” Walton’s formative years coincided with a critical phase for the English book trade. Early in the 1770s sundry Scottish booksellers began to publish multi-volume collections of British poetry, a trend which even­ tually spread to London, resulting in rival editions of unprecedented scope: The Poets of Great Britain (109 vols., 1776-82), John Bell’s series which was completed the year before Walton turned to the poets,2 and The Works of the English Poets (68 vols., 1779-81), the set for which 53 5 4 / B O N N E L L zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Samuel Johnson wrote biographical and critical prefaces. Publishing enterprises of this kind and magnitude had never before been undertaken in Britain. Now there were several; they put before the public a cultural heritage apparently vital to be known. Defined for the first time in uniform print were fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA the poets, the works —in effect, canons of English poetry, worthy of honor, study, and preservation. The dual nature of that definition is evident in Walton’s formulation: celebrated poets / of our own country. The phrase seems to beg the question historically. On the one hand, how can one know who the celebrated English poets are without a notion of English literature first having gained currency? On the other, how can one develop a sense of national literary identity until standard works in that literature have been designated? What appears to be a chicken/egg dilemma, however, does not in this case reduce to a matter of which comes first. The two terms presuppose one another—the selected poets (a canon) and the field from which they are drawn (English poetry) —in a way that discourages hunt­ ing for chronological precedence. A developing notion of canon fosters the awareness of a literary culture; similarly, the growing consciousness of a literary heritage sharpens the perception of canon. This is not to say, however, that an advance on one side of the equation is never at times more conspicuous than the corresponding advance on the other side. Consider Keith Walker’s claim in a recent issue of TLS. He traces the idea of a specifically English literature to the late seventeenth century. Of Dryden’s mature years he writes: “This was the period of the long and fruitful collaboration with Jacob Tonson, the inventor of English litera­ ture. This is a large claim, but consider: Tonson published editions of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and such contemporaries as Dryden, Rochester, Addison, and Steele. With Dryden, he planned and published an almost complete translation of Ovid, a complete Virgil, and a Juvenal and Persius. Dryden and Tonson showed future writers the way to live by their pens, and they also established a pattern of author/publisher rela­ tions that has continued much the same to the present day.”3 England could boast of a literature long before Tonson’s day, to be sure, some of it strongly colored by English themes and patriotic sentiment. Yet the idea of “English literature” may be traced to Tonson, Walker suggests, because he was instrumental in fostering the consciousness of a...