I

In his ‘Introduction’ to The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (1984), Roger Lonsdale presents a conventional map of eighteenth-century poetry as a well-charted and comfortably domesticated landscape, only to suggest that beyond the well-worn track of our customary excursions there lies a vast and unexplored terra incognita. ‘Since the landscape of eighteenth-century poetry is now apparently so well mapped and likely to afford so few unexpected perspectives …’, he writes, ‘it will seem outrageous to suggest that we still know very little about the subject.’ Nevertheless, Lonsdale insists, ‘this must literally be the case’, because literary historians and anthologists have typically neglected the great majority of eighteenth-century poetic texts, focusing their attention instead upon a relatively small group of familiar works. According to Lonsdale, ‘this situation is explicable only if we recognize the hypnotically influential way in which the eighteenth century succeeded in anthologizing itself’. First among the anthologies Lonsdale singles out is Robert Dodsley's A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748-58), which Lonsdale notes is ‘invariably trusted as definitively representative of the mid-century’.¹

Originally published in 1748, the Collection went through twelve editions in thirty-four years, spawned two unauthorized supplements, and was generally regarded as the epitome of polite taste in poetry during the second half of the eighteenth century. In an Age of Miscellanies, Robert Dodsley's Collection of Poems was the best seller of the century. In 1755 the Edinburgh Review judged the anthology ‘much more valuable than any other of the same kind’, and asserted that the ‘volumes of miscellany-poems, published by Mr. Dodsley, are already known to all persons of taste’.²

Not surprisingly, the Collection was widely recommended as an indispensable addition to every gentleman's library. Directions for a Proper Choice of Authors to Form a Library (1766), for example, singled out ‘Dodsley's Miscellaneous Collection, 6 vols. 12mo. being some of the best productions of the present time’ among the thirty-five great works ‘of our own poets’ that the discerning reader should acquire.³ In 1769, writing from his home in Corn Street, Bristol, the 16-year-old Thomas Chatterton remarked to a correspondent that Dodsley's ‘Collection of modern and antique poems is in every library’.⁴ Some three-and-a-half thousand miles away, Thomas Jefferson, compiling a list of 148 titles his brother-in-law must have in his Virginia library, included only Dodsley's anthology and Pearch's supplement to represent miscellanies of contemporary poetry.⁵ John Duncombe, writing in the Gentleman's Magazine (1780), appears to have reflected general public opinion in calling the Collection ‘confessedly the best in our language’.⁶

Robert and James Dodsley were the Faber & Faber of mid-eighteenth-century London. They were the most successful publishers of poetry in their day, and the Collection of Poems, one of their most dependable and lucrative products for thirty-four years, was an emblem of that success. Despite its many lacunae—including the virtual absence of works by Young, Prior, Gay, Swift, Pope, and Smart—the Collection gradually came to be seen by then-contemporary consumers as the miscellany best representing the highest standards of taste in ‘modern’ poetry.

In our own century, several generations of literary historians have taken Dodsley's Collection of Poems to be the most reliable indicator of the state of poetry in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The collection which best represents the poetry of the middle of the eighteenth century is Dodsley's Collection of Poems,’ observe H. V. D. Dyson and John Butt. Maximillian E. Novak calls the miscellany ‘that repository of the best poetry of the period’, while George Sherburn asserts, ‘the taste of readers of poetry in the mid-century is revealed by Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands. … It was in these volumes largely that people of the day read their “contemporary” poetry.’ In much the same vein, James Sutherland surmises that ‘we are safe in taking the reader of this miscellany as the typical poetry-reader of the period’. John Butt may be closest to the truth when he begins his survey of English poetry from 1740 to 1760 with the remark: ‘the most convenient way of examining the state of English poetry at the death of Pope is to turn over the pages of Dodsley's Collection of Poems.’⁷

Because Dodsley's miscellany has come to occupy so central a place in chronicling the state of eighteenth-century poetry—and has been the subject of studies by such accomplished scholars as Courtney, Chapman, and Eddy—it seems highly incongruous that we still know very little about the editing, marketing, and readership of the Collection.⁸ The consequence of this unaccountable gap in our knowledge is that we have virtually no understanding of the relationships among the Collection's bibliographical history, its public reception, and the place subsequently assigned to it by literary historians. In the absence of a reasonably thorough bibliographical profile of the miscellany's ‘life history’, students of eighteenth-century literary culture have been unable to judge in what ways the editorial, marketing, and readership histories of the Collection played a part in determining how the miscellany came to represent the state of poetic production and consumption at mid-century in a seemingly definitive and unassailable way.

Taking up Lonsdale's assertion that ‘these compilations were calculated to appeal to a respectable readership at a precise historical moment’, this chapter shows the extent to which what began as a coterie collection came to be understood as ‘definitively representative’, and considers what this case tells us about the relationship between the book trade and the process of canonization. In sum, by putting the ‘text’ of the Collection in the ‘context’ of its editorial, publishing, and marketing history, I hope to demonstrate by particulars the truth of Lonsdale's general pronouncement that ‘the success of [polite] taste lay less in governing what was written than in influencing what would be allowed to survive’.⁹

II

The classic status that the Collection was to achieve could hardly have been predicted from the publication of the first three-volume edition in 1748. In a letter to Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray complained that the edition was produced in ‘whited-brown paper, and distorted figures, like an old ballad. I am ashamed to see myself, but the company keeps me in countenance.’¹⁰ ‘The company’ was decidedly mixed; it included William Collins, Samuel Johnson, and James Thomson alongside such justly forgotten authors as Hervey Aston, Jacob Hilderbrand, and William Melmoth. Reading through the poorly edited, miserably produced, and comically uneven miscellany, one can scarcely help but wonder what moved Dodsley, a well-established publisher of classical and contemporary poetry, to issue such a second-rate publication.

An analysis of the contents of the 1748 Collection appears to indicate at least something of the bookseller's motivation. In this first edition, we find more than one hundred poems by authors who had already published works through Dodsley or his close associate Mary Cooper, and some forty-four poems from periodicals and miscellanies that Dodsley and/or Cooper had previously sold. Among these are twenty-seven from The Museum: or, Literary and Historical Register (1746-7), six from Philomel. Being a Collection of English Songs (1744), and eight from the Public Register (1741). In all, then, over 85 per cent of the poems in the first edition of the Collection may be said to come from ‘in-house’ sources. Moreover, as James Tierney has noted, Dodsley began publishing the Collection less than four months after he discontinued The Museum, a fortnightly journal containing essays, historical and literary memoirs, and poetry. The miscellany thus may have been conceived as a quick way to sell the substantial backlog of poems left over from his aborted periodical.¹¹

Dodsley's expenses for the first edition of the Collection were apparently quite low; new poems from the distinguished group of literary friends who met at Tully's Head appear to have been ‘donated’ to the cause, and the bookseller already owned the copyright to virtually all the poems he used from his backlist. Except for Dodsley's sending a complimentary copy of the Collection to certain individuals, there is no extant record of payment to any author for the appearance of his work in the Collection of Poems. The poor production of the first edition probably reflects Dodsley's reluctance to invest a great deal in the project: the quality of both paper and printing in this edition is far below the usual standard for a publication issued from Tully's Head, and the editorial treatment is inferior to what we find in Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays, a twelve-volume set that appeared between 1745 and 1746.¹² By all appearances, then, it seems that the bookseller initially had modest expectations for the Collection—it was a low-risk enterprise that allowed him to achieve several desirable ends with a single publication.

We might also add the speculation that Dodsley, a bookseller known both for his remarkable sensitivity to the London poetry market and for his impeccable sense of timing, was testing the market for a new multivolume anthology now that the miscellanies associated with Dryden, Fenton, Steele, Pope, Pemberton, and Lintot no longer occupied a significant place in the London book trade. The former best sellers had run their course and were now dated; perhaps Dodsley sensed that he could occupy the niche left empty by their demise. The bookseller had all he needed to float a trial balloon: a large stock of poetry consisting of some pieces that had already won public approbation and other works that had never appeared in print before, a solid reputation as one of London's leading literary establishments, and sufficient capital to support his plan.

Evidence from the bookseller's surviving correspondence supports the notion that Dodsley himself did not see the first edition of the Collection as anything more than a low-budget publishing experiment. Writing to William Shenstone just six days after the miscellany went on sale, Dodsley admonishes his friend: ‘I am much oblig'd to You for offering me an improv'd Copy of the School Mistress … but I could wish you would not spread the Notion of a New Edition, as that might in some measure retard the Progress of This.’¹³ The bookseller was receiving copy for the much-revised and carefully corrected second edition before the first edition had been on sale for a single week!

Thomas Edwards, writing to Daniel Wray on 25 July 1748, offers a fascinating perspective on Dodsley's highly unusual practice of editing a second edition of the Collection while the first was still being sold. Upon learning from Dodsley that his sonnets were to be included in the radically revised and substantially enlarged second edition, replacing works by William King and Abel Evans, Edwards became worried that he would be compromised by the bookseller's plan:

you ought not therefore to have turned Dodsley loose upon me here alone, without sending me at the same time directions how to act, for I think this so ticklish a point, that I do not care to act of my own head. In the first place I cannot but think this scheme a kind of Popish trick and a hardship upon the purchasers of the first edition, and that if it is so, I ought not to encourage it …¹⁴

Not wishing to offend his valuable customers, Dodsley soon issued a supplemental fourth volume, bearing a 1749 imprint date and now exceedingly rare, to be given to purchasers of the first edition. Presumably this conciliatory gesture allayed Edward's fears; his writings occupy thirteen pages in volume two of the second edition.

The much revised Collection of Poems, which appeared some nine months later, was substantially different in both content and appearance. Nearly one hundred texts were omitted, added, or rearranged. Most significant among the additions were more than twenty-five new poems by Lord Chesterfield, Lord Lyttelton, William Collins, and David Garrick. The inclusion of these works solidified the Collection's literary reputation, while the omission of such pedestrian verses as William King's ‘The Old Cheese’ was equally in keeping with Dodsley's newly modified programme to make the miscellany a repository of polite taste.

Changes in the physical layout of the text similarly reflect the editor's shifting concerns.¹⁵ This miscellany was printed on high-quality paper by John Hughs, who was soon to become Dodsley's favourite printer. The press is generally well corrected. Forty-five pages were added; the design throughout is larger, with considerably more white space. A new engraving adorned the title-page, and, while the first edition had only eleven ornaments (or one every eighty-nine pages) the second edition sported 234 ornaments and fleurons, a remarkable procession of putti, cornucopia, Roman busts, lyres, flowered borders, and other neo-classical trappings. Page for page, Dodsley's second edition is twenty times more ornamented than the first. In fact, the Collection is one of the most highly ornamented mass-market books of the period. Taken together, these changes in the presentation of the text have an unmistakable effect on the reader, suggesting that the poetic performances collected in these volumes are worthy of close attention and careful preservation.¹⁶ Dodsley's Collection no longer gave the impression of a hastily conceived and meanly executed gathering of poetical scraps; its title-page engraving of the nine Muses, its profusion of neo-classical ornaments, and its well-executed illustrations all convey a sense of august sensibility and classical authority that serve to elevate the reader's perception of the poetic texts. This time, Thomas Gray did not complain.

When we consider that the purchasing of paper accounted for about a half of the bookseller's cost for producing a volume, it becomes increasingly clear that Dodsley elected to invest a substantially larger sum in his revised miscellany. Adhering to the standard price of nine shillings for the three-volume set while significantly increasing his printing and paper costs, Dodsley reduced his profit margin for each set of the miscellany. At the same time, however, he sought to ensure that his product would have a longer life in the market. The cost of producing the free supplement to the first edition, nearly 180 pages long, necessarily diminished his profits for the second edition still further. The ‘new’ Collection of Poems was an expensive and somewhat risky business for Dodsley, whose thirteen years as a bookseller had taught him that, in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment, few miscellanies could sustain multiple editions.¹⁷ Dodsley seems to have made a radical break with his original production and marketing plan for the Collection of Poems; at some juncture late in the process of bringing the first edition of the Collection to market, Dodsley evidently decided to adopt a longer-term strategy.

Dodsley's business acumen in deciding to change editorial, production, and marketing strategies for his fledgling miscellany is borne out not only by the Collection's subsequent success, but also by the fact that the first edition did not sell remarkably well. Although there is no extant correspondence to document exact figures, we may surmise from the pattern of advertisements in the London Daily Advertiser, Dodsley's media vehicle of choice at the time, that sales of the Collection were not as brisk as its subsequent track record would lead us to imagine. At this time in Dodsley's career, his usual pattern for a major publication was four advance announcements in the Daily Advertiser, a notice indicating ‘this day is published’, and four or five subsequent announcements. The 1751 edition was advertised nine times, for example, while the 1755 edition was mentioned ten times in the Daily Advertiser. Later, as the Collection became more established, the publisher needed to spend less money giving notice to his product: for the 1758 edition, we find only three notices; with the 1763 edition, Dodsley paid for only two.¹⁸ In sharp contrast, we find the first edition advertised twelve times between 14 January and 8 February, and seven more times between 25 February and 25 March. In addition to these nineteen advertisements, Dodsley placed another on 8 April and still another on 27 May 1748. Good business men do not spend money unless they have to—and Dodsley was an excellent business man. Therefore, this most unusual and otherwise excessive advertising pattern suggests that Dodsley had to keep on paying the editors of the Daily Advertiser in order to sell his slow-moving merchandise.¹⁹

If surviving copies are any indication, it seems that Dodsley may have printed fewer copies of the ‘new and improved’ second edition than of the poorly produced and rather tatty-looking first edition. One problem in making such an assessment, however, is that book-auction catalogues rarely distinguish between the two 1748 editions. Given that many potential buyers of the second edition would have already purchased the first, and that sales of the first edition were not terribly brisk, the bookseller may have elected to print only 250 copies of the revised miscellany. Yet, if the second edition was not widely disseminated, it was, nevertheless, the model for all subsequent editions of these three volumes.

III

We can identify seven reasons, all of which can be traced back to this early stage in the Collection's history, for the miscellany's subsequent commercial success. First, there is the niche theory mentioned above. The market seemed ripe for a multi-volume anthology to represent, and indeed to construct, contemporary taste. Dodsley's Collection effectively replaced earlier miscellanies and held a prominence in the market that may have discouraged subsequent competition. The time was right and the three-volume miscellany was a bold stroke. Secondly, there is the Collection's close association with Pope. Indeed, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the second edition may fruitfully be read as a memorial to Pope, who had been Dodsley's patron.²⁰ Let it here suffice to say that virtually all of Dodsley's editors and a striking number of contributors were closely associated with Pope's circle; that the first three volumes of the second edition include over a dozen poems which repeatedly place Pope at the centre of English letters; and, most importantly, that the very nature of the literary project that Dodsley was effecting in the Collection had strong ties indeed to Pope's own beliefs about the need to preserve poetry in its proper sphere and to protect it from defilement by ‘Smithfield Muses’, ‘Grub Street’, sycophantic laureates, and other compromising, pretentious, or low-born influences.

Closely allied to the Collection's strong ties to Pope and his circle is the third reason for the ascendancy of Dodsley's miscellany: the reputation of the bookseller. The appearance of ‘at Tully's Head’ on a title-page was an aesthetic imprimatur, for Dodsley had already published Pope, Drayton, Glover, Milton, Dalton, Johnson, Whitehead, Nugent, Duck, Shenstone, West, Young, Akenside, Collins, Swift, Walpole, Chapman, Warton, Mason, and Gray. Although there certainly were other highly reputable publishers of contemporary poetry—Bathurst, Hitch, Millar, the Knaptons, the Rivingtons, and the Tonsons—none could claim a roster of poets as distinguished as Dodsley's.

A fourth reason for the Collection's success is the remarkable group of ‘gentlemen’ editors, many of whom came to know the bookseller through Pope, who lent their assistance to the project. George Lyttelton, Joseph Spence, Mark Akenside, Richard Owen Cambridge, Gilbert West, Horace Walpole, and quite possibly Joseph and Thomas Warton and Lord Chesterfield, provided Dodsley with an important network for gathering and evaluating poems, and were instrumental in giving the Collection a sufficiently patrician cast.²¹ The ‘Advertisement’ to the miscellany emphasizes this point, suggesting that behind the footman-turned-bookseller stands an oligarchy well qualified to be the arbiter of polite taste: ‘This design was first suggested to the Editor, as it was afterwards conducted, by the opinions of some Gentlemen, whose names it would do him the highest honour to mention … nothing is set before [the reader], but what has been approved by those of the most acknowledged taste.’²² Although Dodsley's business acumen and knowledge of the bookselling market were by all accounts outstanding, his ‘gentlemen’ editors gave the former servant-in-livery the one thing all his industry could not supply: a highly cultivated sensibility attentive to the principles of decorum, refinement, and polite taste. From what fragmentary evidence we have, it is clear that Dodsley relied most especially upon the decisions of Lord Lyttelton in selecting and editing works for the Collection.²³

In much the same vein, a fifth factor contributing to the miscellany's almost unprecedented popularity is its strongly aristocratic associations. That Dodsley's Collection of Poems has a distinctively patrician pedigree may be seen both in its gentlemen editors mentioned above, and in the fact that some ninety-five of the 226 poems in these volumes, no less than 47 per cent, are either written by peers or are dedicated or addressed to peers.²⁴ The deliberately highbrow tenor of the Collection is altogether in keeping with the general conduct of Dodsley's business. Tully's Head on Pall Mall traded in the stuff of Augustan sensibilities. The most frequently issued type of publication from Dodsley's firm, for example, was classical poetry, either in the original Greek and Latin, or in translation or imitation in English. If Tully's Head issued a number of works on marriage and domestic affairs, it also published four times as many works on monarchy and nobility.²⁵ An essential part of Dodsley's success is the appeal of his publications to that privileged sector of the market with incomes sufficiently large to purchase multi-volume sets such as the twelve-volume Select Collection of Old Plays and the Collection of Poems that was soon to grow to six volumes. The unmistakably aristocratic colouring of Dodsley's miscellany undoubtedly advanced its social cachet and its attraction for many educated and wealthy readers. The fact that nearly 50 per cent of the poems in Dodsley's Collection are so closely associated with the aristocracy almost inescapably leads one to recall that the term classicus originally denoted the wealthiest of the five Roman propertied classes before Aulus Gellius first used the word to signify ‘a first-class and taxpaying author, not a proletarian’.²⁶

We have already noted that the new layout of the Collection, with its many ornaments and classically allusive engravings, contributed in no small way to the overall impression that the miscellany was a distinguished repository of learning and polite taste. The seventh reason for the Collection's success, though of a rather different nature, may have been no less carefully planned. In the years while the Collection was building its reputation, a number of its most popular poems were available to the public only in the miscellany itself. For example, from the time the Collection was first published, Dodsley never reprinted Johnson's ‘London’; anyone who wanted to purchase the poem had to purchase the entire miscellany.²⁷

IV

The acquisition and editing of poems for the Collection's volume four, which appeared in 1755, and for volumes five and six, published in 1758, proceeded in much the same way as the earlier volumes.²⁸ Dodsley continued to draw extensively from his backlist and to appropriate poems from periodicals, including his highly successful weekly journal The World (1753-6). Remarkably, Dodsley's search for fit material to fill out these volumes even led him to return to his earliest sources for the Collection, gleaning still more poems from the already once-harvested contents of The Museum, Philomel, and the Public Register. Shortly after the fourth volume went on sale, Dodsley's long-time friend Horace Walpole wrote to Richard Bentley pronouncing the work ‘the worst tome of the four’, despite the fact that it featured Gray's ‘Elegy’.²⁹ The last two volumes were equally uneven; Dodsley's continued prominence as a poetry publisher notwithstanding, the literary standard of volumes four through six is generally inferior to what we find in the second and subsequent editions of the first three volumes. Nevertheless, literary historians may find consolation in the fact that much of the correspondence between Dodsley and William Shenstone survives to document a substantial proportion of the editorial history of these last three volumes.³⁰ The influence of Dodsley's favourite correspondent, particularly on the 1758 texts, is easily demonstrated by the fact that almost one-fifth of the authors represented in volumes five and six were Shenstone's friends and neighbours.

Although we have a relatively well-developed understanding of who contributed to the Collection and how their work came to be included, we know very little about who actually purchased and, presumably, read this best-selling miscellany.³¹ In order to trace the provenance of Dodsley's anthology, I have examined more than 200 sets of the Collection and have searched through 425 book-auction catalogues covering the years 1750-95. Provenance studies can be fraught with methodological problems, not the least of which is that the average person's books are never sold at auction, nor find their way into Oxbridge college libraries. Moreover, in those rare instances where his books do survive and are signed, it is often impossible to tell where he lived or what he did for a living. What the book-auction and fixed-price sale catalogues can tell us, however, is the extraordinary degree to which the Collection did indeed populate the market. For example, in the twenty-six years from the death of Robert Dodsley in 1764 to the French Revolution, 51 per cent of the catalogues listed a copy of Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands. This does not mean that 51 per cent of readers owned this text, however. Many of the catalogues combined the libraries of several gentlemen, and some of the catalogues are huge ‘General Sale’ affairs from firms like White's and Robson's. Nevertheless, this statistic does indicate that, among the gentry and professional classes, the miscellany was one of the most popular works of its day.

An analysis of the catalogues also tells us that the Collection was a great favourite among clergymen—50 per cent of the copies traceable to particular owners belonged to members of the clergy. That clergymen should constitute such a large sector of the anthology's market is altogether congruent with the fact that Classics and imitations, followed by titles in religion, scripture, and clerical affairs, are the two largest categories of Dodsley's publishing and sales activity.³² Similar logic may help to explain the dearth of lawyers represented, about 5 per cent, since Dodsley published no books on the law. The significant presence of Fellows of the Royal Society, comprising more than 20 per cent of the identifiable purchasers of the Collection, may appear to be unusual, but is really quite understandable given both the social status of that group and the fact that Dodsley's fifth largest publishing category is science and medicine.³³ An analysis of the holdings of Oxbridge college libraries and of contemporary instructors' private collections indicates that the miscellany was moderately popular at the Universities, and appears to have become more so as the century progressed.

What the book-sale catalogues also tell us is that many owners had their copies of the Collection gilt or specially bound—yet another indication of their sizeable disposable incomes. This is particularly true of the 1765 large-paper edition which frequently appears in bindings by Baumgarten, Robiquet, Payne, and Johnson, selling for two guineas or more.³⁴ This edition, which James Dodsley issued between the 1763 and 1766 octavo printings, was clearly meant to solidify the miscellany's ‘classic’ status.³⁵ In much the same vein, the 1782 edition, like the 1780 reissue of A Select Collection of Old Plays, is heavily annotated with learned commentary. These extensive notes by Isaac Reed expanded the market for the miscellany, not only by introducing new matter concerning historical background and the authorship of poems with previously ‘concealed names’, but also by making the Collection compatible with John Nichols's four-volume release of 1780, A Select Collection of Poems, with Notes Biographical and Historical.³⁶ Moreover, if the 1765 edition forwarded an image of the Collection as a classic to be acquired, decorated, and displayed by the wealthy, then the 1782 edition no less suggests that, being the worthy object of scholarship and close annotation, the Collection has evinced its classic status on another front as well. The book trade has long understood that production and public reception are inextricably linked. It is hardly a coincidence that many copies of the annotated edition also appear in special bindings. Both the large-paper and annotated editions may be seen as clever attempts to invigorate a market approaching saturation. By modifying the miscellany, James Dodsley created new sales possibilities and helped to extend the life of his product.

We know that the Collection went through twelve London editions in thirty-four years, but we have little idea as to the size of the press runs. The only firm data we have is that the 1755 fourth volume, according to the Bowyer ledgers, ran to 1,500 copies.³⁷ Such a moderately large press run is understandable given that the market for this volume included all the purchasers of the first three editions, as well as those now buying the new four-volume set. Yet, evidence from press figures, and from publication and printing dates, makes it clear that this Bowyer run of 1,500 was in fact a second impression. In other words, the Collection was selling better at this point than has previously been imagined. It seems most probable that John Hughs's initial printing of volume four ran to at least 1,000 copies and may well have been 1,500. Although the occasional appearance of a 1755 volume four with a new title-page in the 1758 sets indicates that the second press run did not sell out, despite Dodsley's assurance to Shenstone that ‘the four first Volumes are now quite out of print, not a book to be had’, Dodsley's printing of 2,500 or 3,000 copies indicates that the miscellany was enjoying notable success.³⁸ Altered press figures and changes in paper stock also indicate two impressions for the 1758 and 1775 editions. Did Dodsley hedge his bets on the large investment required to produce a six-volume set by printing a conservative number of texts and then commissioning a second impression after he had seen how the product was performing? The bibliographical evidence certainly suggests that some kind of market response strategy was here at work.³⁹

The extraordinary popularity of the Collection of Poems may in no small measure be attributed to the way in which the Dodsleys exercised striking imagination and expertise at every phase of the miscellany's history—editing, production, marketing, and distribution. When we consider that more than 80 per cent of the poems in the second and subsequent editions of volumes one to three of the Collection come either from Dodsley and Cooper authors, or from miscellanies or periodicals Dodsley and/or Cooper had previously published, it is remarkable indeed that this miscellany could be understood for so long to be the mirror of poetic practice in the mid-eighteenth century. When we consider the extent to which Dodsley continued to appropriate works from his previous publications and the manner in which whole sections of the later volumes consist of poems scavenged by Dodsley's gentlemen editors—the strong presence of Shenstone's friends and neighbours is the most notable example—it is highly surprising that this miscellany is routinely adduced as the repository of the best poetry of the period.

One reason for this somewhat distorted view of the Collection is that students of eighteenth-century literary history have naïvely accepted then-contemporary pronouncements about the miscellany without considering their sources. For example, Directions for a Proper Choice of Authors to Form a Library (1766), which so enthusiastically recommends the Collection to prospective book-buyers, was sold by James Dodsley in the same year that he produced an edition of the miscellany. John Duncombe, who in the Gentleman's Magazine called Dodsley's miscellany ‘confessedly the best in our language’, may have been somewhat biased in his critical judgement by the appearance of his own poems in volumes four and six of the Collection. Similarly, the encomiastic verses of Richard Graves celebrating his friend Dodsley's great stature in the literary world must be read in light of the appearance of four poems by the then-unknown author in the Collection's fourth volume:

Where Tully's Bust, the Honour'd Name
          Points out the Venal Page
There Dodsley consecrates to Fame
          The Classics of his Age.
In vain the poets, from their mine
          Extract the shining Glass;
Till Dodsley's Mint has stamped the Coin
          And bade the sterling pass.(40)

Significantly, Graves's poem was edited and submitted for publication in Aris's Birmingham Gazette by his neighbour William Shenstone.

V

The editorial, printing, marketing, and readership history of Dodsley's miscellany is not merely bibliographical arcana. The commercial success of the Collection of Poems is inextricably linked to its influence upon literary history. Had it not so thoroughly dominated the market for thirty years and thus effectively determined what was ‘allowed to survive’, Dodsley's miscellany would not occupy so central a place in the history of eighteenth-century poetry from the death of Pope to the efflorescence of Blake. Until recently, ‘publish or perish’ was a central axiom of literary historiography even more than it was a shibboleth of academic life. Implicitly and perhaps unwittingly adhering to a creed of bibliographical Darwinism, literary historians and teachers of English letters have routinely assumed that what was often reproduced—and so transmitted to subsequent generations—must have been what was most worthy of survival.

Conflating what Alastair Fowler has called the ‘accessible canon’ with the ‘selective canon’, students of the eighteenth century have almost universally subscribed to the belief that Dodsley's Collection must be representative of the age, must be most fit for our historical study, because this group of poems more than any other in the century was a conspicuous publishing success.⁴¹ Although the perdurance of a work is often a legitimate index of its merit, the pervasive and powerful forces of bibliography, economy, and ideology must be duly recognized and taken into account when attempting to understand the cultural life of any text. This is especially true in the case of collections comprising works by multiple authors. Modern literary history is most often tied to commercial success, which, in turn, is inseparable from bibliographical and market forces. The canonical status of a text or group of texts is not exclusively a property of the work itself; the question of canonicity is inseparable from the question of transmission.

Of course, Dodsley himself was not in the business of being representative; Dodsley was in the business of selling books. Given the nature of the trade in poetic wares at Tully's Head, it certainly appears that the last thing Dodsley wanted his Collection to be was representative. By all appearances, the bookseller wanted his miscellany to be distinctive, even exclusive. Unlike Bell, Cook, Anderson, and Chalmers, Dodsley was not attempting to ‘put before the public a cultural heritage apparently vital to be known’.⁴² He was marketing poems by his coterie of authors and by the friends of his close associates for a particular readership.

The labours of David Foxon, Roger Lonsdale, and the developers of the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue have challenged many of our old certainties about the landscape of eighteenth-century poetry and the ease with which we tour the well-cultivated estates of the canonical while blissfully ignoring the undomesticated wilds lying outside its familiar borders.⁴³ To this student of the eighteenth century, the poetic productions of such extra-canonical authors as Alexander Pennecuik, Hetty Wright, and E. Dower are more engaging and, I believe, genuinely more indicative of contemporary compositional practices than are many of the verses found in the pages of Dodsley's ‘definitively representative’ miscellany.⁴⁴ Future scholarship will surely enlighten us further regarding the contributions of these and other relatively unknown poets, even as it alerts us to new perspectives on already established authors and texts. As the revision and re-evaluation of the eighteenth-century poetic canon proceeds, however, we must continue to insist that such critical discussions are appropriately grounded in rigorous bibliographical scholarship.

The case of Dodsley's Collection of Poems appears to substantiate the truth of Professor Lonsdale's proposition that ‘we still know very little about the subject’ of eighteenth-century poetry. New efforts to chart the unexplored regions of the literary landscape will undoubtedly be somewhate disorienting, as old truths are challenged and familiar landmarks recede on the horizon. Students of the period may be consoled, however, by recognizing that it is far better to be asking some of the questions than to be certain that we know all of the answers.

Notes

1. The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford, 1984), pp. xxxv-xxxvi.

2. The Edinburgh Review, for the Year 1755 (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1818), 51. This periodical has no direct relation to the quarterly publication of the same name founded by F. Jeffrey et al. and published by A. Constable from 1802 to 1829.

3. Directions for a Proper Choice of Authors to Form a Library (London, 1766), 40-1.

4. The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor (2 vols.; Oxford, 1971), i. 339. To Mr Stephens, 20 July 1769.

5. A Virginia Gentleman's Library: As proposed by Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipworth in 1771 and now assembled in the Bush-Everard House, Williamsburg, Virginia, intro. Arthur Pierce Middleton (Williamsburg, Va., 1952), 11-15.

6. Gentleman's Magazine, 50 (Mar. 1780), 121.

7. H. V. D. Dyson and John Butt, Augustans and Romantics (London, 1950), 165; Maximillian E. Novak, Eighteenth-Century English Literature (New York, 1983), 117; George Sherburn, ‘The Restoration and Eighteenth Century’, in Albert Baugh (ed.), A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), 1006-7; James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948), 54; John Butt, The Oxford History of English Literature, viii. The Mid-Eighteenth-Century, ed. Geoffrey Carnall (Oxford, 1979), 57. See also Raymond Dexter Havens, ‘Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Dryden's and Dodsley's Miscellanies’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 44 (1929), 501-36; The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley 1733-1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge, 1988), p. xiv; and Richard Wendorf, ‘Robert Dodsley as Editor’, Studies in Bibliography, 31 (1978), 236.

8. William Prideaux Courtney, Dodsley's Collection of Poetry: Its Contents and Contributors (London, 1910); R. W. Chapman, ‘Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands’, Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings and Papers, 3 (1933), 269-316; Donald D. Eddy, ‘Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands (Six Volumes), 1758 Index of Authors’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 60 (1966), 9-30.

9. New Oxford Book, ed. Lonsdale, pp. xxxvi-xxxvii.

10. Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, corr. H. W. Starr (3 vols.; Oxford, 1971), i. 143-4. In this letter, Gray assumes that Dodsley ‘chose to be œconomical’, though he does not speculate why this might be so.

11. James E. Tierney, ‘The Museum, the “Super-Excellent Magazine”’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 13 (1973), 503-15; see especially 509-11.

12. The imprint for all twelve volumes lists 1744 as the date of publication.

13. Dodsley to Shenstone, 24 Mar. 1748, in Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 122. Dodsley's fears were evidently well founded: having received intelligence of the forthcoming second edition, Shenstone himself decided not to purchase the first. See Shenstone to Lady Luxborough, 25 Sept. 1748, in The Letters of William Shenstone, ed. Marjorie Williams (Oxford, 1939), 172.

14. Bodl. MS 1011, fo. 37.

15. Dodsley may well have learnt about the great importance of layout and attention to accidentals from his patron; see David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. James McLaverty (Oxford, 1991), 153-236. Cf. Nicholas Barker, ‘Typography and the Meaning of Words: The Revolution in the Layout of Books in the Eighteenth Century’, in G. Barber and B. Fabian (eds.), Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Wolfenbütteler Schriften zur Geschichte des Buchwesens, 4; Hamburg, 1981), 126-65.

16. For an elegant defence of the notion that ‘forms effect sense’, see D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, The Panizzi Lectures, 1985 (London, 1986), 1-70, esp. 9-21. Cf. Lucia Re, ‘(De)constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry’, Modern Language Review, 87 (1992), 585-603: ‘The illusion that an anthology is simply made up of texts and that texts are always themselves no matter what container contains them is just that: an illusion’ (p. 586).

17. Cf. Arthur Case, Bibliography of English Poetical Miscellanies, 1521-1750 (Oxford, 1935). Throughout the late 1730s and 1740s, Dodsley and/or Cooper were involved in a significant number of miscellanies: among the works they published or sold were The Cupid (London, 1736); Philomel. Being a Collection of English Songs (London, 1744); The Muse in Good Humour (London, 1745); Pastorella; or, The Sylvan Muse (London, 1746); and The Theatre of Wit (London, 1747). Shortly before undertaking A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, Dodsley was the principal seller for R. Cross's A Collection of Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1747), a miscellany of Restoration verse.

18. Throughout most of his career, Dodsley advertised in five newspapers: the Daily Advertiser, General Advertiser, London Chronicle (which he undertook with Wm. Strahan), London Evening Post (in which he owned a 1/15th share), and the Public Advertiser. The data from the Daily Advertiser should therefore be taken as indicative, rather than exhaustive. On the value of newspaper advertisements as bibliographical evidence, see William B. Todd, ‘On the Use of Advertisements in Bibliographical Studies’, Library, 5th ser., 8 (1953), 174-87.

19. Ralph Straus, Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher, and Playwright (London, 1910), 105, asserts that the first edition sold well, but he neither offers any substantiating evidence nor attempts to account for the fact that the second edition was not offered for sale until almost seven months after it went to press. The length of this delay may be explained by Dodsley's unwillingness to offer the second edition before the first had sold out.

20. ‘Dodsley's Collection of Poems and the Ghost of Pope: The Politics of Literary Reputation’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, forthcoming.

21. Significantly, the only women poets Dodsley and his ‘gentlemen’ editors judged worthy of inclusion in the first three volumes of the Collection (both 1748 editions) were Elizabeth Carter, already a well-established author widely renowned for her intellectual accomplishments, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague, a woman of rank and obvious literary celebrity.

22. Robert Dodsley (ed.), A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, (London, 1748), 1.

23. See e.g. Dodsley to Shenstone, 10 Nov. 1753: ‘I will shew them [Shenstone's poems for volume four] either to Sir George, or Mr. Wm. Lyttelton. Most of those [poems] which compose the first three Volumes, were shewn to Sir George [Lyttelton]’ (Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 162).

24. This calculation includes authors who were not peers in 1748, but were subsequently elevated to the peerage.

25. Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 29.

26. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), 250.

27. As owner of the copyright, Dodsley authorized the 1750 fifth edition of ‘London’, published by Cave and sold by Dodsley. Until it was reprinted in Oxford in 1759 under the title Two Satires, ‘London’ was available for purchase only in the 1751, 1755, and 1758 editions of the Collection.

28. After the publication of the first two editions of vols. i-iii in 1748, Dodsley produced a third edition in 1751; the fourth edition of the three volumes appeared in 1755 to coincide with the introduction of vol. iv. The full six-volume set went on sale in March 1758 and comprised the fifth edition of vols. i-iii, the second edition of vol. iv, and the first edition of vols. v and vi. Thereafter, all six volumes were issued together in 1763, 1765, 1766, 1770, 1775, and 1782.

29. Horace Walpole's Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (48 vols.; New Haven, Conn., 1937-83), xxxv. 241.

30. Tierney (Correspondence, 53) notes that ‘28 per cent of the entire collection [of Dodsley's extant correspondence] arises out of the nineteen months immediately preceding the last two volumes’ of the Collection of Poems.

31. Courtney, Dodsley's Collection of Poetry remains the best study of the Collection's lesser-known authors.

32. Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 29.

33. Ibid.

34. On the prominence of these London bookbinders, see Ellic Howe, A List of London Bookbinders, 1648-1815 (London, 1950), p. xxvi.

35. James Dodsley (1724-97), who was twenty-one years younger than his eldest brother Robert, assumed control of the business at Tully's Head upon Robert's retirement in 1759; his name first appears on the Dodsley imprint in 1753, though there is evidence to suggest that he began learning the trade from his brother in the early 1740s.

36. On Reed's editing of the 1782 Collection, see Arthur Sherbo, Isaac Reed, Editorial Factotum (English Literary Studies monograph no. 45; Victoria, BC, 1989), 35-41.

37. The Bowyer Ledgers: the printing accounts of William Bowyer, father and son with a checklist of Bowyer printing, ed. Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (London, 1991), item 3943, Ledger B362, 457, P1109: ‘Dodsley, 10 shts, 1500 crown, dd 25 Mar 55 to Hughs.’

38. Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 332.

39. William B. Todd (‘Concurrent Printing: An Analysis of Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 46 (1952), 45-57) was the first scholar to discover two impressions for the 1758 edition.

40. Aris's Birmingham Gazette, 20 Dec. 1756, quoted in Correspondence, ed. Tierney, 50; see also Clarence Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves (Toronto, 1987), 116-18 and n. 54.

41. Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, New Literary History, 11 (1979), 97-119.

42. Thomas F. Bonnell, ‘Bookselling and Canon-Making: The Trade Rivalry over the English poets, 1776-1783’, in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (East Lansing, Mich., 1989), 53-68. See also Douglas Lane Patey, ‘The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon’, Modern Language Studies, 18 (1988), 23-5.

43. David F. Foxon, English Verse: 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions (London, 1975); Roger Lonsdale (ed.), New Oxford Book, and Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford, 1989).

44. For works by these extra-canonical poets, see New Oxford Book, ed. Lonsdale, 148-50, 165-6, and 312.